Agentic AI

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Developer behind it is sick with worry he might have changed software development in nasty ways

FEATURE Open source developer Geoff Huntley wrote a script that sometimes makes him nauseous. That's becaues it uses agentic AI and coding assistants to create high-quality software at such tiny cost, he worries it will upend his profession.

Here's the script :
while :; do cat PROMPT.md | claude-code ; done

Huntley describes the software as "a bash loop that feeds an AI's output (errors and all) back into itself until it dreams up the correct answer. It is brute force meets persistence." He calls the code and the technique it enables "Ralph," a homage to 1980s slang for vomiting, and to Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum and his combination of ignorance, persistence, and optimism.

The Register put it to Huntley that current human-in-the-loop practices mean developers use AI coding assistants as if playing table tennis: They send a prompt to produce some code over the net, and the LLM bats back some code. He accepted the metaphor, which assumes the developer/bot game continues until the human is satisfied the AI produced something useful, picks up the ball, and goes away to work.

Huntley's approach changes the game by telling a coding assistant to attempt to satisfy a developer's requests, assess whether it did so, then try again until it delivers the desired results. Humans remain in the loop, but enter the software development process later and less often than is the case today.

The developer has used his approach, and Anthropic's Claude Code service, to clone commercial products, a job it can achieve if provided with resources including source code, specs, and product documentation.

Huntley has documented how he used Ralph to create an a tax app for the ZX Spectrum, and later reverse-engineered and cloned an Atlassian product.

Huntley told us he used his techniques to clone a version of open source software a commercial vendor offers under a license he feels doesn't meet his needs. After accessing the company's source code and trans-piling it into another language, he used Ralph to drive Claude Code and create a clone. The results weren't great because he didn't have a spec for the product, but feeding the vendor's documentation into his loop meant Claude eventually produced better software.

The developer told The Register AI can tackle such tasks while consuming about US $10 of compute and/or SaaS resources each hour, a sum he points out is far closer to wages paid to fast food workers than the far better salaries earned by software developers.

Huntley even used his approach to develop a new programming language that he called "Cursed."

"It's cursed in its lexical structure, it's cursed in how it was built, it's cursed that this is possible, it's cursed in how cheap this was, and it's cursed through how many times I've sworn at Claude," he wrote.

What hath I wrought?

He also wonders if the fact it was possible to create Cursed might have hexed the software industry. Which is why Huntley's creation sometimes makes him feel nauseous, and why through 2025 he sometimes paused work on his ideas.

But he kept talking about them with other developers, and after a visit to Silicon Valley noticed considerable interest in his approach – especially among startups.

He says many participants in prominent startup incubator Y Combinator now use Ralph, and that the buzz their efforts created eventually saw Anthropic learn of his work and create a Ralph Wiggum Plugin for its Claude Code product. The creator of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, has said he uses Ralph.

Huntley thinks he has stumbled upon an idea that can change software development, and perhaps entire industries.

Developers, he argues, should now spend more time thinking about writing loops that drive coding assistants to produce better output, rather than persisting with code reviews.

"Agile and standups doesn't make sense any more," Huntley said. "The days of being a Jira ticket monkey are over."

He also thinks that Ralph poses a profound challenge to any business. "Companies have a brand that can't be cloned and goodwill that can't be cloned," he told The Register. "But product features can now be cloned."

Huntley therefore expects that startups will use Ralph to clone existing businesses – especially SaaS outfits – and undercut the prices they charge because they can afford to do so using agentic coding that costs $10 an hour instead of having to pay a full staff of human coders.

And that's a scenario that could make many, many, people feel very sick indeed. ®