{"slug": "show-hn-looperators-work-with-agent-loops-visually", "title": "Show HN: Looperators – work with agent loops visually", "summary": "Looperators, a new tool for AI coding agents, places agents on a visual canvas connected by executable edges that automatically move context, trigger agents, and decide when loops finish, eliminating the need for developers to manually shuttle messages between agents. The system generates graphs automatically from natural-language conversations and supports patterns like multi-model debate and code review with stopping conditions such as 'until the review is clean, at most 6 laps.'", "body_md": "**looperators puts your AI coding agents on a canvasand wires them into loops that run themselves.**\n\nWhen you point AI at a complex programming task, you often end up running several agents at once: different models drafting solutions and debating them, or one agent writing code while another reviews it, round after round. But each agent lives in its own window, and the one shuttling messages between them is you—paste A's output to B, carry B's feedback back to A, every single round. The more agents and the more rounds, the more you become copy-paste middleware.\n\nThat middleware role breaks down into three jobs: moving context between agents, triggering the right agent at the right time, and deciding when the loop is finished. looperators hands all three to the graph. Agents sit on a canvas, connected by edges—and the edges are not a diagram, they execute: when an upstream agent finishes, its output travels down the edge to the next agent; the downstream conclusion flows back up and wakes the original agent to keep going. Who triggers whom, what context moves, and when to stop are all defined on the edge. You stop relaying messages and only set up the relationships and the stopping condition once.\n\nYou don't assemble that graph by hand, either—**looperators is not a low-code\nbuilder.** Chat with your agents the way you always do; whenever a loop takes\nshape in the conversation, the matching graph appears on the canvas\nautomatically, ready to edit. Power users who want to design loops directly\ncan do it in plain conversation too—no dragging boxes and wires.\n\nA favorite pattern: throw one problem at several models at once—Codex, Claude Code, and Grok Build each draft a solution, read and challenge each other, and revise until the discussion converges on a consensus. Nobody carries drafts around; the graph drives every round.\n\nCode Review is another ready-made ring: wire a coder and a reviewer together with one stopping condition—\"until the review is clean, at most 6 laps.\" Finished work goes to review automatically, blocking issues come back automatically, and a badge on the ring shows the current lap. Any agent on the graph is a real session you can open mid-run as a normal chat: tell the reviewer \"ignore style, logic only,\" and the loop keeps running.\n\nThat is what **loop-native** means—the bet this whole workspace is built on:\nsessions are born into relationships, and loops are the system's mother tongue,\nnot a patch bolted onto isolated chats. Design the loop once; the canvas keeps\nit visible, bounded, and yours to steer.\n\nMost coding-agent tools treat every session as an island, with you as the ferry between them. In looperators, sessions live in relationships. They can wake one another, exchange context, review one another, return work upstream, and continue until a real stopping condition is met.\n\nTwo questions shape the product:\n\nWhen you step away, does the workflow keep moving?\n\nWhen you return, can you quickly understand what happened and why?\n\nTraditional workflow tools ask you to manually assemble a pipeline before work can begin. looperators starts with an outcome.\n\nChoose a ready-made loop or describe the goal to a Master Agent. The system can propose the participants, relationships, permissions, and stopping conditions. You inspect the proposal, approve it, and use the graph to understand or change the workflow—not to draw every step from scratch.\n\n| Traditional workflow builder | looperators |\n|---|---|\n| Starts from an empty canvas | Starts from a goal or ready-made loop |\n| Nodes are stateless actions | Nodes are long-lived agent sessions |\n| Edges mainly route data forward | Relationships carry context, reviews, evidence, retries, and triggers |\n| Optimized for a DAG and its happy path | Rejection, repair, return paths, and repeated verification are native |\n| The graph describes a planned pipeline | The graph remains live while agents work |\n\nUnlike systems that call a model as a disposable step, every looperators node remains a real session. Open it as a normal chat, inspect its messages and tool activity, intervene, freeze future activations, or resume it with its existing history.\n\nlooperators does not need a built-in action for every job an agent might perform.\n\nCode review, testing, research, migration, triage, summarization, and security analysis can all be expressed through prompts. The graph supplies the reusable control semantics around them:\n\n- what event triggers the next session;\n- what context moves with the handoff;\n- whether a transition is automatic or requires judgment;\n- what happens when new work arrives while an agent is busy;\n- what result, goal, deadline, or limit stops the loop;\n- which relationships remain active for future events.\n\n“Review until clean” is therefore one useful loop, not a special-purpose boundary around what looperators can do. Change the prompts and the same shape becomes a security audit, test-and-fix cycle, migration checker, or verification workflow.\n\nOne agent implements a change. Another reviews it and returns blocking issues. The findings reactivate the original session, which repairs the work and sends it back for another pass.\n\nThe loop stops only when the Reviewer reports clean or a configured guardrail is reached. Every lap, verdict, and return path remains visible.\n\nRun several agents or models as independent planners, let them read and challenge one another, and then synthesize the strongest result.\n\nThe built-in **Plan Council** preserves the proposals, disagreements, peer\nreviews, and route to the final decision—not only the final answer. More complex\ndeliberation workflows can continue exchanging feedback until a consensus rule\nor round limit is met.\n\nGive different sessions distinct responsibilities: investigate, implement, review, test, and verify. Independent branches can work in parallel and rejoin when all, any, or a quorum of results is ready.\n\nA failed verifier can route its evidence back to the responsible session; a passing verdict can release the next stage. Verification becomes part of the workflow rather than a final prompt someone must remember to run.\n\nDescribe “done” in one sentence and pair a Worker with an independent Judge. The Judge can use executable evidence—tests, lint, metrics, searches, or other checks—then return a structured verdict.\n\nA failed check sends the evidence back to the Worker. A passing check stops the loop. The Worker does not get to declare itself finished simply because it made progress.\n\nA loop does not have to begin with a person sending a message. It can wake on a schedule, a Git change, a script result, a webhook, or another registered event.\n\nUse this for recurring maintenance, CI failure response, code-change review, issue triage, or scheduled summaries. Leave out the stopping condition and a relationship can remain ready for the next event.\n\nEach participant is a real code-agent session with its own history, context, model, tools, and workspace state. A loop resumes the session that already knows the work instead of recreating a disposable agent at every step.\n\nRelationships define who reacts to whom, what wakes the next session, what context moves, whether approval is required, and when work returns upstream or stops. They are durable rules, not lines drawn after execution.\n\nStart with **Review until clean**, **Run until goal**, **Handoff**, or **Plan\nCouncil**, or describe a more complex objective to a Master Agent. The Master\nacts as an intent compiler: it proposes the participants, relationships, safety\npolicy, and graph changes without silently starting work.\n\nYou can review and lock the proposal before approval. Once a stable workflow is running, the Master only needs to wake for judgment, exceptions, or replanning; it does not sit in the middle of every mechanical transition.\n\nThe graph brings together three views of the same work:\n\n**Intent:** the relationships that say what should happen next.**Activity:** the turns, handoffs, triggers, verdicts, and failures that already happened—and why.**Governance:** the approvals, locks, scopes, and Master roles that determine who may change the workflow.\n\nLoops appear as readable units with their current lap, state, stop condition, and timeline. See whether a loop is running, waiting for a gate, blocked, complete, frozen, or stopped by a guardrail, then open the exact session or event that explains it.\n\nReliable agent loops need both.\n\nlooperators handles the mechanical parts deterministically: event matching, context delivery, activation, joins, stopping rules, concurrency behavior, persistence, recovery, and resource limits. If new events arrive while an agent is busy, they can be coalesced so the agent handles the latest accumulated state once instead of processing a queue of stale intermediate work.\n\nAgents handle the parts that require judgment: planning, implementation, review, synthesis, diagnosis, and deciding whether evidence satisfies the goal.\n\nThat separation keeps loops flexible without asking a model—or a person—to remember how to route every turn.\n\nAutonomy is useful only when its limits are explicit. Depending on the loop, looperators can enforce:\n\n- maximum laps, deadlines, fan-out, concurrency, and session limits;\n- automatic, Master Agent, or human approval gates;\n- optional usage warnings or hard budgets;\n- workspace coordination so parallel writers do not silently collide;\n- durable workflow state, artifacts, decisions, and causal history;\n- freeze, stop, retry, and consistent recovery controls.\n\nThe goal is not simply to start more agents. It is to make long-running agent collaboration visible, bounded, and safe enough to trust.\n\nlooperators currently ships a macOS (Apple Silicon) build; on other platforms, run from source.\n\nand drag looperators into Applications.[Download the latest release](https://github.com/ObservedObserver/looperators/releases/latest)- Install and sign in to at least one supported code agent—Claude Code, Codex, or Grok Build.\n- Open looperators and start with\n**New Workflow** for a ready-made loop, or open a Master chat to describe a more complex objective. Chat and the Agent graph remain available throughout the run.\n\nTo run from source instead:\n\n```\nnpm install\nnpm run dev\n```\n\nlooperators is an early alpha. Interfaces, storage contracts, and advanced controls may evolve before a stable release.\n\nThe current build includes direct agent chats, the live Agent graph, handoffs, Review-until-clean loops, Goal loops, Plan Council, schedules and external triggers, loop timelines, Master-authored workflow proposals and replanning, barriers, persistent state, usage and concurrency controls.\n\nPlease report rough edges, failed setups, unclear concepts, and workflows you would like to run. Early feedback will directly shape the product.\n\nLicensed under the [Apache License 2.0](/ObservedObserver/looperators/blob/main/LICENSE).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-looperators-work-with-agent-loops-visually", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/ObservedObserver/looperators", "published_at": "2026-07-22 13:33:10+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-22 13:52:38.391402+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "developer-tools", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Looperators", "Codex", "Claude Code", "Grok Build"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-looperators-work-with-agent-loops-visually", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-looperators-work-with-agent-loops-visually.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-looperators-work-with-agent-loops-visually.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-looperators-work-with-agent-loops-visually.jsonld"}}