Shipping with Claude

Everyone's talking about AI loops this month. Set a goal, walk away, come back to finished work. That's the pitch. We run loops every day. Some of them are good. One of them shipped a bug this week while every check said PASS. So here's what a loop is, how a good one is built, and where ours broke. What a loop is A loop is an agent doing a cycle of work over and over until something tells it to stop. Anthropic's Claude Code team puts it plainly: they "define loops as agents repeating cycles of work until a stop condition is met" ( Claude blog ). Think of a thermostat. It checks the room, turns the heat on or off, checks again. The checking is the whole trick. A heater with no thermostat still runs. It doesn't know when to quit. That's the difference people mean by closed loop and open loop . It's a control-systems analogy, not an official AI term. A closed loop measures its own output and adjusts. An open loop runs blind. Anthropic's...

We build mostly with Claude. But a lot of our planning happens in ChatGPT, and OpenAI now gives you three ways in: Chat , ChatGPT Work and Codex . Pick the wrong one and you either wait too long or get too little. Here's the short version. Use Chat to think something through. Use Work to hand off a task with a clear deliverable. Use Codex when the work is code. That's our framing, not OpenAI's wording. OpenAI's own docs put it this way: Chat is for when you want to "work through something with ChatGPT." Work is for when you "define an outcome and get a reviewable result." What each one is Chat is the conversation you already know. OpenAI calls it "fast, conversational assistance and everyday questions." ChatGPT Work is an agent. It "can plan a task, gather context, use tools, and carry the work through to a result you can review." It can make docs, slides, spreadsheets and PDFs. Codex is OpenAI's coding agent, ...