Nathaniel Whittemore traces the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, agentic loops and graph-based workflows. He explains that the important design choice is not the fashionable label, but how work, evidence and verification move through a system until a clear outcome is reached.
A useful loop needs a task that takes more than one prompt and an objective stopping condition that the agent can verify. Whittemore recommends defining concrete coverage, quality and duplication checks before execution. If the finish line is ambiguous, the loop is likely to stop too early, run too long or produce work that cannot be trusted.
Graphs become useful when one apparent task actually contains separate goals, branches or specialist perspectives. Whittemore shows how multiple agents can research, critique and assemble work, but cautions that extra nodes add coordination cost and failure modes. His practical rule is to keep one agent when it can complete the job, and add structure only when evidence shows that the simpler loop has reached its limit. Promotional references are omitted.
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