In my quest for unbounded SWE productivity, I end up at the viral Ralph loop. So what is the Ralph Loop? Well it’s a way or framework for autonomous software engineering. The Ralph Loop starts with the conversation with the agent, defining a spec of the feature. This spec goes through careful fine-tuning and handcrafting, it will ultimately serve as the source of truth for the agents to work on. Once the spec is done, the crucial thing to keep in mind is compaction and context rot. Key principle of using Ralph is to keep your context crisp, keep going back to the spec as source of truth and not use the same agent session to do everything. Why? Because we need to avoid forgetting crucial information during compaction.
I had such a great time watching this video which explains the ralph loop. You cant help but lol when Geoffrey ends specification sentence with “I don’t know, figure out how posthog does it.”