Don't Waste Your Back Pressure
by geoffrey-huntley
Back pressure—automated feedback on quality and correctness—is the key mechanism that enables AI agents to handle complex, long-horizon tasks.
Australian software engineer and AI Engineer at Sourcegraph with 14+ years of experience, best known as a core maintainer of ReactiveUI, a .NET Foundation project for functional reactive programming. His open-source contributions power tools used in Microsoft Visual Studio, GitHub, Atlassian Sourcetree, Amazon Drive, Halo, and Slack.
Notes (13)
Building Code-Editing Agents: The Emperor Has No Clothes
by geoffrey-huntley
Coding agents are just 300 lines of code running in a loop—demystifying AI tooling reveals that the model does the heavy lifting, and understanding these primitives transforms you from AI consumer to AI producer.
Open-Source Maintainers are Jerks!
by nick-randolph, geoffrey-huntley
Companies consume open source freely while holding unpaid maintainers to impossible SLAs—the solution is treating open source as critical infrastructure that requires active contribution, not just consumption.
Fundamental Skills and Knowledge You Must Have in 2026 for SWE
by geoffrey-huntley
Understanding how coding agents work—tool calls, inferencing loops, the basic primitives—is now baseline knowledge for software engineering interviews, not optional curiosity.
How to Build a Coding Agent (Repository)
by geoffrey-huntley
A hands-on Go workshop that builds a coding agent incrementally through six files, each adding one capability - proving agents need only simple primitives composed in a loop.
The Ralph Wiggum Loop from First Principles
by geoffrey-huntley
Software development now costs $10.42/hour when running Ralph loops—the key is deterministically malicking the array, starting with a screwdriver before grabbing the jackhammer.
Deliberate Intentional Practice with AI
by geoffrey-huntley
AI's perceived ineffectiveness stems from insufficient deliberate practice, not fundamental limitations—mastery requires the same intentional experimentation as learning a musical instrument.
Ralph: Step-by-Step Setup Guide
by ryan-carson, geoffrey-huntley
Ralph ships code while you sleep—a bash loop that pipes prompts into your AI agent, picks tasks from a JSON backlog, runs tests, commits passing code, and repeats until done.
Ralph Wiggum (and why Claude Code's implementation isn't it)
by geoffrey-huntley, dex-horthy
The official Anthropic Ralph plugin differs fundamentally from the original technique: outer orchestrators with full context resets produce deterministic outcomes, while inner-loop plugins with auto-compaction lose critical context.
Ralph Wiggum as a Software Engineer
by geoffrey-huntley
A Bash loop technique ('Ralph') that feeds prompts to AI coding agents repeatedly, enabling autonomous project development with iterative refinement.
How to Build a Coding Agent: Free Workshop
by geoffrey-huntley
Coding agents require only 300 lines of code in a loop with LLM tokens - understanding these fundamentals transforms you from AI consumer to producer.
Libraries
by geoffrey-huntley
Open-source sustainability is the real crisis, not AI code generation—companies benefit from free software but rarely compensate maintainers, and reframing sponsorship as marketing could fund the infrastructure everything depends on.
Some Software Devs Are NGMI
by geoffrey-huntley
Software developers who fail to adopt AI tools will experience natural attrition—not mass layoffs—as their peers achieve 16x productivity gains and redefine baseline performance expectations.