Ralph Wiggum as a "Software Engineer"

Summary

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 ; doneRalph 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 - it's deterministically bad in an undeterministic world. Ralph can be done with any tool that does not cap tool calls and usage (ie, Amp). Ralph is currently building a brand new programming language. We are on the final legs 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 an extreme amount 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, but instead looked inside. Each time Ralph does something wrong, Ralph gets tuned - like a guitar.deliberate intentional practiceSomething 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 andLLMs are mirrors of operator skillThis 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 thatIt starts with no playground in the beginning, with instructions for Ralph to construct a playground. Ralph is very good at making...