Ralph loop

Plain English. Practitioner slang for the bluntest possible agent pattern: run a coding agent on the same prompt, in a loop, until the tests pass — fresh attempt each time, no cleverness between runs. Named for The Simpsons' Ralph Wiggum and popularised by Geoffrey Huntley, the joke being that persistence beats sophistication more often than dignity allows.

Why it moves money. The Ralph loop converts model unreliability into a compute bill. If a model succeeds one attempt in five, five cheap attempts with a verifier is a working system — so falling token prices directly expand the range of tasks brute-force loops can profitably automate. It is the degenerate case of the broader shift practitioners describe: the unit of engineering is no longer the prompt but the loop and its acceptance criteria.

What to watch. The crossover arithmetic: retry cost per verified success versus the human cost of doing it properly. Every token price cut moves that line.

From the signals. Stop prompting, start engineering loops — practitioners state the loop-engineering thesis in their own words. A reported 232x kernel speedup from driving Codex in a loop against an algebraic correctness gate.

Further reading. Geoffrey Huntley, "Ralph Wiggum as a software engineer".