Ask three people what “loop” means in AI right now and you’ll get three different answers. One will say the agent loop. Another will start talking about model collapse and feedback loops. A third will mention human-in-the-loop from some compliance meeting. They’re all correct, which is exactly why the word has become so confusing.
I’ve been writing software for over 8 years, and I’ve watched plenty of jargon get recycled. But “loop” is special because it’s not one trend — it’s at least four different ideas that all happen to share the same word, and all of them got hot at roughly the same time. So let me untangle them.