the eighteen-month recap: AI Engineer, Singapore, May 2026

This is the eighteen-month recap: the talk I gave on day two of AI Engineer Singapore. A lot has happened since the six-month recap in Melbourne. The recording is below, followed by an edited transcript with the slides. AI Engineer Singapore, Day 2 Welcome back. For those who were at the party here last night, he actually came on for a couple of sets and DJed as well. So who is Geoffrey Huntley? He's an independent AI researcher known for doing unhinged things with AI. He's the person behind the Ralph loop, which is now incorporated in many, many tools that are used today. Ralph Wiggum as a "software engineer" How Ralph Wiggum went from 'The Simpsons' to the biggest name in AI right now - Venture Beat 😎Here's a cool little field report from a Y Combinator hackathon event where they put Ralph Wiggum to the test. "We Put a Coding Agent in a While Loop and It Shipped 6 Repos Overnight" https://github.com/ Geoffrey Huntley Geoffrey Huntley Hello everyone. As confident as I might seem about these topics, I must say this is quite a provocative title. I don't know. So when you're listening to this, I want you to reflect upon it. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. It's a provocative title because I'm saying that software development now costs less than minimum wage. There was a time when, if you wanted to do photography, you had to buy specialized tools. But now everyone's got an iPhone, and everyone's a photographer. Think about that. Things have changed. With that disclaimer out of the way: I do not work for anyone. I am completely independent. I do not represent anyone. So this is going to get spicy. Let's do it animal style. Software development now costs less than than the wage of a minimum wage worker Hey folks, the last year I've been pondering about this and doing game theory around the discovery of Ralph, how good the models are getting and how that's going to intersect with society. What follows is a cold, stark write-up of how I think it's going to go down. The financial impacts are already Geoffrey Huntley Geoffrey Huntley It's been roughly a year and a half since I published the technique of allocating memory in a particular way. If you wrap the tool calls around another loop, it's just a loop. But there's a lot of science in the context engineering needed to actually achieve these outcomes, and it's quite disruptive. Here I was giving this talk about how everything has changed, and this was a week before Atlassian did their layoffs. Oops. You see, the unit economics of business have forever changed. I want you to really understand how big this is. If you do not believe this is true, you need to stop speaking with other developers. You need to speak with founders. You need to speak with business leaders. You need to get a little more curious about what this means and get ahead of what this means for business. What does it mean when everyone is a software developer? For no particular reason at all, Cursor was at the same meetup. This isn't a plug for Cursor, but I want to call something out at this meetup. Here's Roslyn, and there were other people like Roslyn. They're designers. They're product managers. And they're having the time of their damn lives. There weren't any software engineers up there giving talks. That's because they're now being enabled to become software developers. For the first time ever, it's like an iPhone in their hands. They can just get stuff done. They can take photos. They can develop software. Whatever is in their wildest dreams, they can do. I've been traveling around the world for the last three months. I think I've given this talk 17 times now in different cities, including Auckland. In Auckland, I decided to go on a side quest to Hobbiton from The Lord of the Rings. My tour guide asked, "Geoff, what do you do?" and I'm like, "I do AI. Please don't judge me." Next thing you know, his eyes lit up, and he goes, "Geoff, how good is AI? How good is AI?" What does it mean when your tour guide is token-maxing?