Ralph Wiggum Technique

The Ralph technique is a minimal prompting approach that enables autonomous, loop-based agent execution. Named after the Simpsons character, it embraces simplicity and iterative refinement.

Core Philosophy

"Ralph is deterministically bad in an undeterministic world."

Key insight: Simpler prompts (~40-50 lines) often outperform verbose prompts (~200+ lines). Overly detailed prompts can make agents "slower and dumber."

The Ralph Loop

In its purest form, Ralph is a bash loop:

while :; do cat PROMPT.md | claude-code ; done

The agent runs continuously, making incremental progress. Failures are expected and corrected through iteration.