In today’s episode, Cassidy, Marlene, and GPS tackle the ever-growing pile of new AI and agent terminology that's popped up seemingly overnight. They break down loop engineering (designing systems that prompt your agents instead of prompting them yourself), the Ralph loop that helped popularize it, and how squads and fleets let multiple agents split up planning, testing, and review work in parallel. They also dig into harness engineering (the scaffolding around a model that turns raw text generation into something useful), the newly coined “hill climbing,” and why forward deployed engineer might just be a solutions architect with better AI tooling. They wrap with a look at the spectrum between closed, open weight, and open source models, plus each host's open source pick of the week: Astro 7, the RAE API project, and Tau.
Links mentioned in the episode:
Loop Engineering by Addy Osmani
Ralph Wiggum as a "software engineer"
MCP
LangChain
Astro 7
RAE API
Tau