Technology Radar
The Ralph loop (also sometimes called the Wiggum loop) is an autonomous coding agent technique where a fixed prompt is fed to an agent in an infinite loop. Each iteration starts with a fresh context window: the agent selects a task from a specification or plan, implements it, and the loop restarts with a fresh context. The core insight is simplicity. Rather than orchestrating teams of coding agents or coding agent swarms, a single agent works autonomously against a specification, with the expectation that the codebase will converge toward the spec over repeated iterations. Using a fresh context window on each iteration avoids the quality degradation that comes from accumulated context, though at significant token cost. Tools such as goose have implemented the pattern, in some cases extending it with cross-model review between iterations.
