“Loop engineering” is a hot buzzphrase after mentions of it by Boris Cherny (Claude Code’s creator) and Peter Steinberger (OpenClaw's creator) went viral on social media. Loops are now a key part of how we get AI agents to iterate at length to build software. In this letter, I’d like to share my 3 key loops, shown in the image below, for building 0-to-1 products. These loops guide not just how I build software, but also how I decide what software to build.
Agentic coding loop: Given a product specification and optionally a set of evals (that is, a dataset against which to measure performance), we can have an AI agent write code, test its work, and keep iterating until the code is bug-free and meets its specification. This idea of closing the loop took off around the end of last year, and it has been a game changer in enabling coding agents to work longer productively without human intervention. For example, over the weekend, I was building an app for my daughter to practice typing, and my coding agent could easily work for around an hour, using a web browser to check what it had built multiple times before getting back to me, without needing my intervention.
The engineering loop executes quickly. Every few minutes, the coding agent might build and test a new version of the software. I hear frequently from developers who are finding new ways to engineer more effective engineering loops. This is an active area of invention!
Developer feedback loop: In this loop, a developer examines the current product and steers the coding agent to improve it. Last year, a lot of developers (including me) were acting as the QA (quality assurance) function for our coding agents, manually finding bugs and then asking the agent to fix them. But with coding agents much more able to test their own code, the amount of time we need to spend on this function has decreased significantly. This allows us to make higher-level product decisions, such as what key features to offer, where the UI needs improvement, and so on.
The developer-feedback loop operates over time intervals between tens of minutes and hours — that's how frequently a developer might review a product and give feedback. In the case of the typing app, I changed my mind a few times about the visual design, what cat costumes she can unlock as she learns (she loves cats), and the user flow for a grown-up to log in and steer the child's learning experience.
When a developer has a clear vision for what to build, it is still a lot of work to translate that vision into a specification for a coding agent to implement. Further, after the developer has seen an implementation, they might update (or perhaps clarify) the spec to steer it toward what they want. If you find that the system repeatedly runs into certain problems, building a set of evals for the agent becomes useful.
AI-native teams are increasingly using AI to help shape product direction, for example, automating the gathering and analysis of usage data, summarizing written and verbal customer feedback, or carrying out competitive analysis. However, for pretty much all the products I’m involved in, I see humans as having a significant context advantage over current AI systems — we know a lot more than the AI system about the users and the context the product has to operate in — and thus humans play a critical role. Many people describe this human contribution as “taste,” but I prefer to think of it as humans having a context advantage, since that gives us a clearer path to helping AI systems get better. This also speaks to why this step can’t be automated: So long as the human knows something the AI does not, human-in-the-loop is needed to to inject that knowledge into the system.
External feedback loop: This includes a wide range of tactics like asking a few friends for feedback, launching to alpha testers, or putting the code into production with A/B testing. These tactics are usually slow, rarely taking less than hours and sometimes taking days or even weeks. This data informs the developer vision, which in turn continues to drive the detailed product spec, which in turn drives the coding agent.
With coding agents speeding up software development, more engineers are starting to play a partial product management role. For many engineers who are growing into this role, the hardest part is shaping the product vision and striking a balance between building (bridging the gap between vision and spec) and getting user feedback to evolve the vision. It is important to do both!
I will write more about how to do this in future posts, but for now, I find it encouraging that engineers are playing an expanded role (just as product managers and designers now do more engineering).
[Original text: The Batch]
1/
A manager liked our AI agent demo. Then he asked one question that killed it:"When it breaks in production, whose name is on it?"Nobody had an answer.I spent a year putting agentic AI into a real dev workflow. Here's why most rollouts stall — and it's never the tech. 🧵
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None of these are tech problems. They're org problems.
Agentic AI stalls because it exposes holes that already existed — in governance, accountability, and how we divide work.
Full write-up, with research + references 👇
https://t.co/MqjQb6rQas
AI-native software engineering teams operate very differently than traditional teams. The obvious difference is that AI-native teams use coding agents to build products much faster, but this leads to many other changes in how we operate. For example, some great engineers now play broader roles than just writing code. They are partly product managers, designers, sometimes marketers. Further, small teams who work in the same office, where they can communicate face-to-face, can move incredibly quickly.
Because we can now build fast, a greater fraction of time must be spent deciding what to build. To deal with this project-management bottleneck, some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) ratios downward from, say, 8:1 to as low as 1:1. But we can do even better: If we have one PM who decides what to build and one engineer who builds it, the communication between them becomes a bottleneck. This is why the fastest-moving teams I see tend to have engineers who know how to do some product work (and, optionally, some PMs who know how to do some engineering work). When an engineer understands users and can make decisions on what to build and build it directly, they can execute incredibly quickly.
I’ve seen engineers successfully expand their roles to including making product decisions, and PMs expand their roles to building software. The tech industry has more engineers than PMs, but both are promising paths. If you are an engineer, you’ll find it useful to learn some product management skills, and if you’re a PM, please learn to build!
Looking beyond the product-management bottleneck, I also see bottlenecks in design, marketing, legal compliance, and much more. When we speed up coding 10x or 100x, everything else becomes slow in comparison. For example, some of my teams have built great features so quickly that the marketing organization was left scrambling to figure out how to communicate them to users — a marketing bottleneck. Or when a team can build software in a day that the legal department needs a week to review, that’s a legal compliance bottleneck. In this way, agentic coding isn’t just changing the workflow of software engineering, it’s also changing all the teams around it.
When smaller, AI-enabled teams can get more done, generalists excel. Traditional companies need to pull together people from many specialties — engineering, product management, design, marketing, legal, etc. — to execute projects and create value. This has resulted in large teams of specialists who work together. But if a team of 2 persons is to get work done that require 5 different specialities, then some of those individuals must play roles outside a single speciality. In some small teams, individuals do have deep specializations. For example, one might be a great engineer and another a great PM. But they also understand the other key functions needed to move a project forward, and can jump into thinking through other kinds of problems as needed. Of course, proficiency with AI tools is a big help, since it helps us to think through problems that involve different roles.
Even in a two-person team, to move fast, communication bottlenecks also must be minimized. This is why I value teams that work in the same location. Remote teams can perform well too, but the highest speed is achieved by having everyone in the room, able to communicate instantaneously to solve problems.
This post focuses on AI-native teams with around 2-10 persons, but not everything can be done by a small team. I'll address the coordination of larger teams in the future.
I realize these shifts to job roles are tough to navigate for many people. At the same time, I am encouraged that individuals and small teams who are willing to learn the relevant skills are now able to get far more done than was possible before. This is the golden age of learning and building!
[Original text: https://t.co/1pUxNC5UXk ]
Most AI agent discussions focus on capabilities.
But in production, the real question is:
How do you keep an autonomous agent safe?
I built a Hermes-on-Kubernetes security architecture based on one idea:
👉 Treat AI agents as semi-trusted workloads, not application logic.
That means:
- sandbox everything
- zero-trust networking
- strict skill isolation
- human-in-the-loop for risky ops
AI agents aren’t just apps.
They’re autonomous operators inside your infra.
And Kubernetes defines their blast radius.
Releasing a new "Agentic Reviewer" for research papers. I started coding this as a weekend project, and @jyx_su made it much better.
I was inspired by a student who had a paper rejected 6 times over 3 years. Their feedback loop -- waiting ~6 months for feedback each time -- was painfully slow. We wanted to see if an agentic workflow can help researchers iterate faster.
When we trained the system on ICLR 2025 reviews and measured Spearman correlation (higher is better) on the test set:
- Correlation between two human reviewers: 0.41
- Correlation between AI and a human reviewer: 0.42
This suggests agentic reviewing is approaching human-level performance.
The agent grounds its feedback by searching arXiv, so it works best in fields like AI where research is freely published there. It’s an experimental tool, but I hope it helps you with your research.
Check it out here: https://t.co/n7ctnDilJJ
Yesterday I shared a talk on debugging OpenBMC firmware with GDB 🔧🐧
Topics covered:
• Config & run GDB
• Use disassembly to find .text section
• Manually map crash addr → source line
Slides: https://t.co/xila2r9Lsn
#OpenBMC#Debugging#GDB#EmbeddedLinux#Yocto#OpenSource
🚀 Running OpenBMC on Raspberry Pi 3!
I wrote a step-by-step guide covering:
• Yocto build setup
• Hello World service via Yocto recipe
• Live & core dump debugging w/ GDB
👉 Read here: https://t.co/lmOMNUQER8
#OpenBMC#Yocto#RaspberryPi#EmbeddedLinux
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