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.

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.

Building software with Ralph requires a great deal 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; instead, I've looked inside. Each time Ralph does something bad, Ralph gets tuned - like a guitar.

deliberate intentional practice

Something I’ve been wondering about for a really long time is, essentially, why do people say AI doesn’t work for them? What do they mean when they say that? From which identity are they coming from? Are they coming from the perspective of an engineer with a job title and

Geoffrey HuntleyGeoffrey Huntley

LLMs are mirrors of operator skill

This is a follow-up from my previous blog post: “deliberate intentional practice”. I didn’t want to get into the distinction between skilled and unskilled because people take offence to it, but AI is a matter of skill. Someone can be highly experienced as a software engineer in 2024, but that

Geoffrey HuntleyGeoffrey Huntley

It begins with no playground, and Ralph is given instructions to construct one.

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.

what's in the prompt.md? can I have it?