Before the shitstorm rolls in: of course loops aren't for noobs. It's a burner headline. :) There are some genuinely great loop concepts out there.
But here's my problem with most of them: they're completely one-dimensional. Why?
When /loops started trending I'd already been living in Claude Code for three weeks. So on June 19 I actually said it out loud to a colleague: loops-are-for-noobs. How can I say that with a straight face? Because I'd been running /teams successfully for a good week by then — and next to that, /loops and /skills just felt lame.
/teams is just the logical next step
The thing is, /teams isn't a competitor to any of that. It's a combination of all of it:
- skills
- loops
- routines
- guardrails
- hooks
- agents (and team-agents)
- training (or briefing)
- visualisation (my dashboard)
- ...
But multi-dimensional. The list doesn't end there — you add whatever you can imagine to it.
Loops vs. teams, with rockets
We live in scary, crazy times, so let me use rockets as the example.
Loops are the old-school kind: lock the target, go for it no matter what. Teams are the smart kind: they read the situation and react.
And that's the whole point, because development — for me — has never meant "reach a certain target no matter what". It's always meant: solve the client's problem, in the best (or easiest) possible way. Or just make the thing possible at all.
A loop can't do that. A team can.
Here's what actually bugs me, though. Skills and loops are everywhere right now — and half the time they get used against their own name. Think about it: a skill is supposed to be something you can do, something that makes you a pro. But the way it's sold, a "skill" is just a thing you install and run. That's backwards.
The logical version isn't me running a loop with a bag of skills strapped on. It's a briefed bot — a "Bob" — trained for exactly that one job. Stack those up and you don't get "a loop with skills". You get a team of agents with skills, running through loops. Not just the combination of all of it, like I said up top — the exponentiation. That's the logical next step.
And a skill belongs to a person, doesn't it? A skill makes the pro. So why would I want a thousand skills I have to run myself — when I could hire the pros instead? Aren't I the bigger pro if I hire pros?
And loops-are-for-noobs? Not an attack. The line just slipped out — and the second it left my mouth I thought: okay, that wasn't exactly nice. But it stuck. A punchline I couldn't resist, that's all it is.
That's exactly why my vision of the company of the future isn't a bigger loop. It's something else entirely — beyond your imagination:
