Geoffrey Huntley is an Australian software engineer who writes and speaks about software engineering practice and developer tooling. He is known online for a mix of advocacy, demos, and memorable framings that translate messy day-to-day engineering work into simple operator loops and constraints.

More recently, his public work has focused on agentic coding: how to structure AI-assisted development as a set of repeatable loops with explicit verification, and how to adapt team and personal practices to the reality that an engineer can “reach” across stacks via agents.

Ideas and Work on AI-Assisted Development

“Ralph” / the Ralph Wiggum loop (verification-first iteration)

Huntley coined “Ralph” (often “Ralphing”) as a way to describe an iterative loop where an agent attempts a change, then a verification step decides whether the loop continues. The point is to move from “chatty progress” to testable progress by making the exit condition explicit (tests pass, build succeeds, a checker script returns 0, etc.).

Related: Ralph Wiggum Loop – January 2026 Snapshot.

“One task per context window” (context hygiene)

He has emphasized context hygiene as an operator skill: treat a context window like a scarce resource, keep it focused, and reset frequently rather than letting long, drifting sessions degrade quality.

Related: Context Hygiene, Context is a Per-Feature Budget.

Identity erasure (stack identity becomes less durable)

Huntley uses “identity erasure” to describe a shift where language/framework identity (e.g., “I’m a .NET developer”) becomes less central, because agents make it cheaper to traverse unfamiliar stacks. In this view, advantage comes less from allegiance to a toolchain and more from general engineering judgment: decomposing work, defining checks, and orchestrating loops.

Related: Orchestrator vs. Executor.

“A ~300-line agent” (demystifying autonomy)

He has argued (often by demonstration) that an effective coding agent can be relatively small: a loop around an LLM plus a handful of primitives (read files, write files, run commands) and a discipline of verification and reset.

References