Ralph Wiggum Loop Explained
January 19, 2026
The Ralph Wiggum Loop is getting a lot of attention in the AI agent space, but there’s still confusion about what it actually is and what problem it’s trying to solve. In this video, we break down the real failure mode behind long-running agent loops. Context accumulation, why retries make agents worse over time, and why common fixes like compaction can be lossy. The Ralph Wiggum Loop is one response to that problem. Not as a magic trick, but as a pattern that resets context while preserving progress through external memory and review. This video uses goose as the concrete environment to explore the idea, but the concepts apply broadly to agentic workflows.
It’s a very good, succinct, and short overview of the Ralph Wiggum loop, which is all the rage right now. If you want to know where the fuss is about, set aside a handful of minutes and get up to speed with this.
