Origin Story: A Tale of Two Ralphs
January 13, 2026
Origin Story: A Tale of Two Ralphs
To understand the “Ralph” tool is to understand a new approach toward improving autonomous AI coding performance — one that relies on brute force, failure, and repetition as much as it does on raw intelligence and reasoning.
Because Ralph Wiggum is not merely a Simpsons character anymore; it is a methodology born on a goat farm and refined in a San Francisco research lab, a divergence best documented in the conversations between its creator and the broader developer community.
The story begins in roughly May 2025 with Geoffrey Huntley, a longtime open source software developer who pivoted to raising goats in rural Australia.
Friend of Web Directions and speaker at our conferences, Geoff Huntley is along with The Simpsons’ Ralph Wiggum having a moment.
If you had the privilege to attend our UN conferences last year, our Code Conference, or our Engineering AI Conference, you would have heard Jeff speak about his experience of working with large language models to develop software.
Not much more than 12 months ago, he was quite sceptical about them. A little over 12 months later, he is one of the highest-profile people in the field. And here he is getting some attention from none other than VentureBeat.
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