Loop vs Graph Engineering: A Clear Guide to Choosing Agent Orchestration Patterns
blaizedsouza · x · 2026-09-10
- A systemized explainer of the two dominant agent orchestration paradigms, sparked by Peter Steinberger's one-liner asking whether the community has shifted from loops to graphs.
- Loop engineering: a single agent cycles through plan → act → verify → repeat; reliability comes from deciding what context survives iterations, how the agent evaluates its own work, retry and failure handling, and stop conditions. Best when one agent can own a coherent task end to end.
- When to move to graphs: tasks requiring parallelism, agents with different context/tools/memory/permissions, or human-approval gates break down when forced into a single loop — that's when graph-style orchestration is needed.
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