Nathaniel Whittemore

He wrote a blog post called Ralph Wiggum as a Software Engineer, and as he put it in his introductory blog post, in its purest form, Ralph is a bash loop.

So you might ask, what the heck is a bash loop?

First of all, bash is short for born again shell, which is a command line interpreter that basically means it's the program sitting between a person and the operating system when they're working through a terminal.

It reads the commands you type, it understands scripts, it runs programs, and it handles things like variables and loops.

A bash loop then is the way to tell a bash shell, do this thing over and over until I say stop or until a condition is met.

It's a way to automate repetitive command line tasks instead of copy pasting commands.

Simplifying it even more, it's a written instruction that tells the computer to repeat the same task over and over automatically.

So let's use some analogies that aren't about coding.

Imagine you leave a sticky note for an assistant that says, for each folder on my desk, open it, check what's inside, then move on to the next one.

You didn't list every folder, you didn't do the work yourself, you just described the pattern once.

That's an example of this type of loop.

Another analogy would be a checklist with a rule.

Instead of a bullet list that says rename file A, rename file B, rename file C, you say rename every file in this folder the same way.

The key idea is that this type of loop tells the computer what to repeat and when to stop.

So the idea of Ralph as applied to AI coding was described by developer Ryan Carson in a post on X. He writes, everyone is raving about Ralph.

What is it?

Ralph is an autonomous AI coding loop that ships features while you sleep.

Each iteration is a fresh context window.

Memory persists via Git history and text files.

Now he gets into exactly what this loop looks like from a technical perspective, but the Startup Ideas podcast with Greg Eisenberg had Ryan on to explain it even more simply.