Tool Use - AI Conversations Ryan Carson Explains The Ralph Wiggum Loop
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Jan 27, 2026 
Ryan Carson, founder of Untangle and creator of a divorce AI agent, explains the Ralph Wiggum Loop and agent orchestration. He discusses fresh context windows, deterministic hooks, and agent browser testing. Ryan covers PRD-driven acceptance criteria, scaling with parallel loops, and using cron-like loops to automate marketing and self-healing systems.
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Fresh Context Through Short Agent Runs
- The Ralph Wiggum Loop runs an agent repeatedly on discrete user stories to get fresh context each run.
- Each loop reads and updates simple files (tasks JSON, progress.txt, agents.md) to share memory across runs.
Specify Testable Acceptance Criteria
- Write user stories with precise, agent-verifiable acceptance criteria before starting a Ralph loop.
- Use files like progress.txt for short-term memory and agents.md for long-term memory to guide the agent.
Agents Replicate Team Workflow
- The loop mirrors human sprint workflows: pick a task, work offline, ship, repeat.
- Running multiple loops in parallel can massively parallelize delivery like having many developers.