Ralph Wiggum as a "software engineer"

If you've seen my socials lately, you might have seen me talking about Ralph and wondering what Ralph is. Ralph is a technique. In its purest form, Ralph is a Bash loop.
while :; do cat PROMPT.md | npx --yes @sourcegraph/amp ; done
Ralph can replace the majority of outsourcing at most companies for greenfield projects. It has defects, but these are identifiable and resolvable through various styles of prompts.
That's the beauty of Ralph - the technique is deterministically bad in an undeterministic world.
Ralph can be done with any tool that does not cap tool calls and usage (ie, Amp).
Ralph is currently building a brand new programming language. We are on the final leg before a brand new production-grade esoteric programming language is released. What's kind of wild to me is that Ralph has been able to build this language and is also able to program in this language without that language being in the LLM's training data set.
Amp creating a new programming language AFK https://t.co/KmmOtHIGK4
— geoff (@GeoffreyHuntley) July 13, 2025
Building software with Ralph requires an extreme amount of faith and a belief in eventual consistency. Ralph will test you. Every time Ralph has taken a wrong direction in making CURSED, I haven't blamed the tools, but instead looked inside. Each time Ralph does something wrong, Ralph gets tuned - like a guitar.


It starts with no playground in the beginning, with instructions for Ralph to construct a playground. Ralph is very good at making playgrounds, but he comes home bruised because he fell off the slide, so one then tunes Ralph by adding a sign next to the slide saying “SLIDE DOWN, DON’T JUMP, LOOK AROUND,” and Ralph is more likely to look and see the sign.

Eventually all Ralph thinks about is the signs so that’s when you get a new Ralph that doesn't feel defective like Ralph, at all.
When I was in SFO, I taught a few smart people about Ralph. One incredibly talented engineer listened and used Ralph on their next contract, walking away with the wildest ROI. These days, all they think about is Ralph.
From my iMessage
— geoff (@GeoffreyHuntley) July 11, 2025
(shared with permission)
Cost of a $50k USD contract, delivered, MVP, tested + reviewed with @ampcode.
$297 USD. pic.twitter.com/0JgT8Q19bV