"Huntley describes the software as "a bash loop that feeds an AI's output (errors and all) back into itself until it dreams up the correct answer. It is brute force meets persistence." He calls the code and the technique it enables "Ralph," a homage to 1980s slang for vomiting, and to Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum and his combination of ignorance, persistence, and optimism."
"The Register put it to Huntley that current human-in-the-loop practices mean developers use AI coding assistants as if playing table tennis: They send a prompt to produce some code over the net, and the LLM bats back some code. He accepted the metaphor, which assumes the developer/bot game continues until the human is satisfied the AI produced something useful, picks up the ball, and goes away to work."
Open source developer Geoff Huntley built a simple bash loop that repeatedly feeds an AI coding assistant's output, including errors, back into the model until it produces a correct result. The technique directs the assistant to attempt a task, self-assess success, and iterate until the desired outcome, reducing human involvement and shifting human intervention later in the process. Huntley named the approach "Ralph" and used Anthropic's Claude Code to clone commercial products when given source, specifications, and documentation. He documented using Ralph to create a ZX Spectrum tax app, to reverse-engineer and clone an Atlassian product, and to reproduce a commercially released open-source version after transpiling accessed source code.
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