# [AIN#37] Life-saving staging skills

- Publication: Loop Labs Lab Notes (https://looplabs.cc/blog/)
- Author: Rich Steinmetz
- Published: 16 Sep 2026
- Canonical HTML: https://looplabs.cc/blog/ain-37-verify-what-the-app-saved/

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Hey party devs! I'm in Austin. I came a bit early before Rails World because I saw that there are some big-name meetups and hackathons almost daily, so as always, I got a bit too excited. So now I'm here, ingesting the startup atmosphere, going to tech meetups daily, getting heatstroke because I kinda like walking no matter what and riding in a driverless Uber for the first time in my life.

I also think that I'm learning that language-focused dev communities like r/rails, r/ruby and Austin JS User Group are more inclined to have a negative sentiment towards AI coding and what's going on right now than the AI-first/entrepreneurial bubble that I'm usually in, plus the token-powered meetups like AI Implementation Club and Claude Code Austin Meetup. It's a process, but I think I'm learning. Whether you are in one camp or another, you will be surprised, too, or feel your views confirmed, so I thought it's a good one to share anyway.

We are not gonna be doing any deep dives today, but if there was one thing that changed my (dev) life for the better that you might not see how to embrace today but might help you immensely long-term, with small and big projects, I would share this: Teaching your agentic pets to help with deploys has saved me lots of time and made the software I've built recently higher quality:

`/staging-deploy-loop` - One bigger project I'm working on has some human-in-the-loop deploy mechanisms and there was no way to be notified when things were ready to test on staging. There must be a read-only API or an isolated way (in the browser) for you to check staging for its deployment status every minute, if you will, without touching production.

`/staging-qa` - This one is probably one of my favorite skills of all time. Describe well how you want the different parts of your app (UI, API, etc.) to be tested. You can probably borrow from the local testing skills. Ask it to create proof: GIFs, videos, images, or text reports in a specific, easy-to-scan format (for API/MCP stuff). This is a lifesaver if you agree that manual tests have never been the thing you enjoyed about engineering. Rarely, I do end up doing things in the UI, which is fine. At the end of it all, you should let the skill output a list of critical findings. If any of those block deployment, roll back. Otherwise, deploy and fix them forward.

## [AIN#37] AI Nuggets Week#37

### 📺 Expert Knowledge YouTube Nuggets

**State of Agentic Coding #10 with Armin and Ben** (Armin Ronacher & Ben Vinegar) - If someone asks you what the current state of agentic coding is, this is the episode to pass them. Really well laid out from different angles, no hype.

## 🎰 Just for Fun links

(I'm having fun so you don't have to)

**Sweet memories of AI psychosis** (Michelle & Sunil, Next Token) - Remember when you just learned that you could build anything with the right prompt and people still insisted on going outside? :D