Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
When coding agents got good enough at the end of 2025, Morgan Stanley's roughly thirty person research group asked what would happen if agents ran the research, not just wrote the code. The result is AlphaLab, a multi agent system they built and open sourced. You hand it a problem in plain language and it writes the code, sets up back tests and evals, configures and submits cluster jobs, and runs the statistical tests, managing its own context as it goes. They skipped every off the shelf framework and wrote their own harness so they could watch how it reasons and bake in their own standards.
The shape is a strategist that proposes experiments and workers that run them, laid out as a board of cards people can read, edit, and approve before the loop optimizes against a weak eval. Rappazzo shows it finding real gains now used internally, from fine tuning a model to predicting credit bonds, and argues the lasting human job is designing the verifiable environment the agents compete in, like a private Kaggle, while they handle the middle.
Speaker info:
- https://x.com/brendanh0gan
- linkedin.com/in/brendan-rappazzo-hogan-763734115
- bhogan.net
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction: a thirty person research group
1:30 - What changed when coding agents arrived
2:55 - Building AlphaLab 1.0, open sourced
4:34 - Encoding enterprise standards into the system
6:40 - Why they skipped off the shelf harnesses
8:21 - How the research loop runs
9:36 - Strategist and worker agents
10:40 - Guarding against a bad eval
13:23 - Finding real improvements
16:12 - Verifiable environments, like Kaggle
18:45 - The human job in the limit
When coding agents got good enough at the end of 2025, Morgan Stanley's roughly thirty person research group asked what would happen if agents ran the research, not just wrote the code. The result is AlphaLab, a multi agent system they built and open sourced. You hand it a problem in plain language and it writes the code, sets up back tests and evals, configures and submits cluster jobs, and runs the statistical tests, managing its own context as it goes. They skipped every off the shelf framework and wrote their own harness so they could watch how it reasons and bake in their own standards.
The shape is a strategist that proposes experiments and workers that run them, laid out as a board of cards people can read, edit, and approve before the loop optimizes against a weak eval. Rappazzo shows it finding real gains now used internally, from fine tuning a model to predicting credit bonds, and argues the lasting human job is designing the verifiable environment the agents compete in, like a private Kaggle, while they handle the middle.
Speaker info:
- https://x.com/brendanh0gan
- linkedin.com/in/brendan-rappazzo-hogan-763734115
- bhogan.net
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction: a thirty person research group
1:30 - What changed when coding agents arrived
2:55 - Building AlphaLab 1.0, open sourced
4:34 - Encoding enterprise standards into the system
6:40 - Why they skipped off the shelf harnesses
8:21 - How the research loop runs
9:36 - Strategist and worker agents
10:40 - Guarding against a bad eval
13:23 - Finding real improvements
16:12 - Verifiable environments, like Kaggle
18:45 - The human job in the limit
