Anyone who has run a coding agent on a real task — not a demo, a multi-hour grind through a milestone — has watched the same decay curve. The first hour is sharp. By the third, the agent is re-reading files it already read, contradicting decisions it made earlier, and confidently "fixing" things it broke twenty minutes ago. Nothing is wrong with the model. What's wrong is the session: the context window has filled up with stale file dumps, dead ends, and its own chatter, and the signal is drowning in it.
The fix that actually works in practice is embarrassingly stupid, and it has a name: the Ralph loop.
This isn't theory for me. I run this pattern today on Zenve3D: I hand a master agent a milestone, it works through the issues one by one, and every worker starts with a fresh context while LLMBrain carries the project state between them. The rest of this post is how that works, from the dumb bash loop it started as to the skill it became.
What a Ralph loop is
The technique comes from Geoffrey Huntley, who named it after Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons — the kid who is not the sharpest but keeps cheerfully showing up. In its original form it is literally this:
