Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, said something recently that matched my own experience: “I don’t prompt Claude anymore… my job is to write loops.” Peter Steinberger put it more bluntly: “You should be designing loops that prompt your agents.”

I’ve been building LLM-powered pipelines on top of Spring Integration for a while, and those two lines named what I had been doing without quite realizing it. My time had stopped going into prompts. It was going into the loops around them.

I’ve spent the last few weeks building a documentary video generation pipeline. A topic goes in (say: “Sankebetsu brown bear incident 1915 Hokkaido”) and a finished mp4 comes out (a ten-minute narrated documentary, 27 scenes, original visuals, voiced by a documentary-grade TTS), all running on a homelab cluster.

Between those two endpoints sits a chain of eight passes that hand off to each other. Several fan out to “do N things in parallel and aggregate.” Several produce artifacts measured in MB per scene that should not be shoved through a message broker. A few are the right place to put a human in the loop, where one minute of editorial review saves hours of GPU time downstream.

Three Production Apps, Zero Code: What Keip Actually Looks Like in Practice#

In the past month I shipped three integration apps to my home cluster: a Spanish translator that replies in audio, a health tracking bot I can query from any room in my house, and a camera alert system that decides for itself what’s worth telling me about. Each one took under an hour to have running. None of them required me to write a single line of application code.

Enterprise Integration Patterns Aren’t Dead; They’re Running on Kubernetes and Orchestrating AI#

Keip is a Kubernetes operator for Enterprise Integration Patterns. Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf documented these patterns in 2003: content-based routers, message transformers, splitters, aggregators, dead letter channels. Spring Integration has implemented them for years, but deploying Spring Integration on Kubernetes has always been harder than it should be. Keip fixes that. It turns integration routes into native Kubernetes resources, and I use it to run an LLM-powered media analysis pipeline on my home cluster.