The Boss Loop: Run a Team of Claude Sub-Agents Under One Strict Reviewer

The boss loop is a way of writing one prompt so that Claude does the checking instead of you. You hand it a task, you tell it to spawn a team of worker sub-agents to do the building, and then you add a third instruction that most people leave out: you appoint one agent as a strict boss whose only job is to tear the work apart. The workers build, the boss rejects, they rebuild, and the loop only ends when the boss scores the work as good.

"The boss loop" is our name for it. Nobody in the industry calls it that, and you will not find it in Anthropic's documentation. The published names for this family of technique are loop engineering and agent loops, and the specific two agent version of it is written up on this site as the Gauntlet Loop. If you have read that guide, this one is the fan out and the cost control: what changes when the builder is a TEAM rather than one agent, and what that does to your bill.

• The mechanism is real and it is what the Claude Code team themselves describe doing
• The name is ours
• The part almost nobody warns you about is the token cost, and it is the reason this guide exists