The Ralph Wiggum Technique, created by Geoff Huntley, went viral in the final weeks of 2025. Here's the story of ralph since the first time I met Geoff in June of 2025.
I've been messing with ralph since ~June 2025. Here's my story and what I learned along the way.
tl;dr
Jan 1 2026 - If you wanna skip to the end, I did a deep dive on ralph w/ Geoff Huntley on Jan 1 2026. It talks through the history, cursed lang, and compares the original bash-loop ralph implementation with the anthropic stop-hook implementation. You can check it out here:
### June 19th 2025
I attend a meetup with about 15 members of a Twitter GC where we talk about agentic coding. It's the first time I see context7, WisprFlow, specstory, taskmaster, and a whole bunch of other tools and addons, some of which are now quite mainstream. One of our engineers demos an early TUI for Claude approvals and what becomes the foundation of research / plan / implement.
There are about 3 hours of presentations. Geoff shows up 2 hours late and presents last. He completely steals the show, diving deep on ralph, cursed lang (at the time, the compiler stack is written in Rust), livestreaming autonomous coding overnight while asleep in Australia, subagents in amp code, the virtues of drinking 3 margaritas and shouting at cursor, and much, much more.
Geoff talks about the "overbaking" phenomenon. If you leave ralph running too long, you end up with all sorts of bizarre emergent behavior, like post-quantum cryptography support.
It has dimensions of art, deep engineering, the embrace of chaos, and the raw and authentic joy of making a thing.
All ~15 of us have a long and (imo) somewhat unsettling conversation about the future of software dev—about how easy it is to take a SaaS and copy 80-90% of it, and about how many types of work are about to change or disappear entirely.
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