For the past two years, the dominant unit of AI work was the prompt. Write a better prompt, get a better answer. Learn the right phrasing, the right examples, the right constraints, the right tone. Prompt engineering became the first folk discipline of the generative AI era because it matched the first experience most people had with these systems: one human, one model, one request, one response.  That phase is ending.  A recent Business Insider piece describes the rise of “loop engineering”: th