A Brief History of Ralph
by dex-horthy
The Ralph Wiggum Technique evolved from a novel idea to a mainstream development methodology in under a year—early adopters learned that poor specs doom loops and iteration beats over-planning.
CEO and Founder of HumanLayer (YC F24). Former engineer at NASA JPL and Replicated. Obsessed with helping developers build safe, impactful AI agents for complex codebases.
Notes (3)
Ralph Wiggum (and why Claude Code's implementation isn't it)
by geoffrey-huntley, dex-horthy
The official Anthropic Ralph plugin differs fundamentally from the original technique: outer orchestrators with full context resets produce deterministic outcomes, while inner-loop plugins with auto-compaction lose critical context.
No Vibes Allowed: Solving Hard Problems in Complex Codebases
by dex-horthy
A practical framework for getting AI coding agents to work reliably in brownfield codebases through context engineering, intentional compaction, and the Research-Plan-Implement workflow.