Ralph

Ralph is an agentic coding technique coined by Geoffrey Huntley ('Ralph Wiggum as a software engineer', ghuntley.com/ralph): put a coding agent in a while-true bash loop feeding it the same fixed prompt every iteration. Each iteration starts with a fresh context window, reads specs and the plan from disk, does exactly one unit of work, validates it observably, commits, and exits. Nothing survives between iterations except what's written to disk — which kills context rot. The technique went viral in late 2025; Anthropic shipped an official ralph-loop plugin, and the community built playbooks, packaged skills, and overnight-execution systems on top of it.

The honest picture: it's stubbornness as strategy — 'deterministically bad in an undeterministic world.' It works best for multi-step tasks with clear, checkable end states; it's wasteful for one-shot edits and can burn API credits if the plan goes stale (regenerate the plan when the loop starts circling). Reference implementation: ghuntley/how-to-ralph-wiggum.

Copy the loop template into your repo (PROMPT.md, IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md, specs/), then ./loop.sh plan 5 and ./loop.sh build 20; or install Anthropic's ralph-loop plugin.