Nathaniel Whittemore

This led to work churning for long periods of time without progress.

The next approach they took was to separate roles.

Instead of a flat structure, they created a pipeline where a subset of agents called planners would continuously explore the codebase and create tasks, and workers would pick up those tasks and focus entirely on completing them.

The workers, they wrote, don't coordinate with other workers or worry about the big picture.

They just grind on their assigned task until it's done, then push their changes.

At the end of each cycle, a judge agent determined whether to continue, then the next iteration would start fresh.

This, they said, solved most of our coordination problems and let us scale to very large projects without any single agent getting tunnel vision.

Now, this is the point at which they instituted this ambitious goal of building a web browser from scratch.

Now, as we heard at the beginning, this worked, but not without a lot of challenges.

They write, our current system works, but we're nowhere near optimal.

Planners should wake up when their tasks complete to plan the next step.

Agents occasionally run for far too long.

We still need periodic fresh starts to combat drift and tunnel vision.

But the core question, can we scale autonomous coding by throwing more agents at a problem, has a more optimistic answer than we expected.

Hundreds of agents can work together on a single code base for weeks, making real progress on ambitious projects.

Now, one of the things that struck me as interesting when I was reading this was the way that they described their planners and workers system.

Swix shared this section of the blog post and nailed it when he wrote, Cursor independently invented the Ralph Wiggum loop to solve the problems they were seeing with parallel agent orchestration.

So this gets us to Ralph Wiggum.

One of the weirder of these names, even if the concept itself isn't overly complicated.

The concept was coined by developer Jeffrey Huntley actually all the way back last July.