REEL: A Proper Name for the Autonomous Agent Loop

There is a pattern spreading through the AI coding community. You write a spec, an outer loop spawns fresh AI sessions for each task, acceptance checks gate progress, and the codebase accumulates working code — all without a human in the loop. The pattern works. But it is stuck with a name borrowed from a cartoon character. The "Ralph Wiggum loop" is fun, but it does not belong in a design document. The pattern deserves a proper name — one that works as a verb, a noun, and a proper acronym. That name is REEL . What is a REEL? REEL stands for Review Evaluated Engineering Loop . It describes any autonomous coding workflow with these five characteristics: Spec in — a structured specification defines the tasks Fresh session per task — each task gets a clean context window (no accumulated drift) Acceptance check — every task must pass a defined verification (tests, linters, reviews) State on disk — progress is tracked in files, not in memory Iterate until done — failed tasks are retried, pa