ralph_loop

A fresh session every round, so nothing carries over. The agent starts from the task and from the repository each time, and what the round before it did is whatever it left in the working directory. The oldest trick in unattended agent work, and still the one that survives longest runs: a loop that cannot poison itself with its own context.

hmz exec -f ralph_loop -a claude/claude-opus-5:high "$(cat TASK.md)"

ralph_loop

Every round starts where the last one did: from the task and from whatever the round before it left in the working directory.

Why it holds up

A session that runs for a day accumulates every wrong turn it took. A round that starts clean reads the repository as it is — including the tests the last round broke and the file it left half-written — and has no memory of the reasoning that got it there.

The cost is real and worth saying: an agent that forgets will re-derive things, and will sometimes undo a decision it made an hour ago because nothing in the tree records that it was a decision. Write the decisions into the repository, and the loop reads them back. stateful_ralph is the same loop with the opposite trade.

What it takes

budget: 25    # millions of output tokens; 0 goes on until it is stopped

budget	Millions of output tokens the loop may spend before it stops, counted across every run of it in this workspace. 10 by default, and 0 goes on until it is stopped by hand.

hmz exec -f ralph_loop -c budget.yaml …, or /config at the prompt. See Settings of its own.

What it keeps

rounds and output. A loop left going for days is a loop that will be stopped — esc, a machine that goes down, a turn that takes the process with it — so running it again goes on from the round it reached rather than back at one, and the budget it is held to is the one the whole week of restarts shares.

A loop that has spent its budget is over, and what is over is not picked up: it clears what it kept, so the next run here opens on a budget of its own and at round one rather than stopping before it has taken a turn. Picking a run up is the whole of it.

See also

• stateful_ralph — one session instead, re-sent the task each round
• official/fixed_juice_ralph — this loop with a governor on it
• official/goal — this loop, with each round run as the agent's own goal
• Loops — writing one of these yourself