Software Engineering and Loop Engineering Through the Lens of Engineering Cybernetics

Juggle enough projects and you crash first on decisions and process control — it looks like software engineering, but it is software craftsmanship. Starting from the layered intuition of project management, this post returns to Qian Xuesen's 1954 Engineering Cybernetics, maps feedback loops, hierarchy, and human-in-the-loop onto CI/CD, SRE on-call, observability, chaos engineering, and 2026's Loop Engineering, and lands back on a workflow I am rebuilding.