@kazani
Ralph Wiggum - a new meme among vibecoders
Yes, that stupid character from The Simpsons.
Only now it's a new name for an AI coding technique, and the story of its emergence
It all started with Geoffrey Huntley: an Australian open-source developer who quit software and went to raise goats in rural Australia.
https://ghuntley.com/ralph/
He was annoyed by the main bottleneck in working with Claude Code: humans. The AI makes mistakes, and you check them. It makes mistakes again, and you check them again.
His solution is 5 lines in bash.
A loop that forces the AI to work until the task is solved. Made a mistake? Get your own output back and try again (and again and again).
LLM is like Ralph from the cartoon: it's stupid, makes mistakes, but stubbornly continues until it gets to the result. {Ralph is a Bash loop} — as Huntley himself said.
The model is not protected from its own mess, it has to deal with it. If you push hard enough, it will come up with a solution to break out of the loop.
By December 25, Anthropic officially added a plugin to CC, and on January 6, they quietly renamed it to ralph-loop {per legal guidance}; apparently, Disney didn't appreciate the joke.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/ralph-wiggum
In general, the hype about Ralph has gone: Someone even launched a meme coin $RALPH on Solana
In X they write that this is the closest to AGI: https://x.com/i/status/2000725017617649728
➡️ How it works:
1/ You give CC a task + a promise of completion (<promise>COMPLETE</promise>)
2/ Claude works and tries to exit when it thinks it's ready
3/ The hook blocks the exit, checks the promise
4/ If it's not fulfilled, it launches the same prompt again
5/ A self-referential system until the task is solved
About security: you need the flag --dangerously-skip-permissions, it gives full control over the terminal.
To not burn the budget on an impossible task, set --max-iterations (20-50) and it's better to run in isolated environments like cloud VMs (the AI might accidentally delete your files)
Here's a video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_IK18goX4X8 from a well-known developer and teacher, explaining why Ralph Wiggum is so effective