Ralph Wiggum - do it from first principles
I thought I was ahead of the curve with AI adoption - until I realised I'd fallen behind. The mistake I made wasn’t ignoring a tool; I underestimated how fast AI skills compound.
The Ralph Wiggum method is making the rounds and has X on fire. It’s with good reason; it’s a glimpse of what’s possible - a taste of things to come.
Truth be told, I ignored it during the initial hype up in December. Most people hyping things up aren’t worth listening to much. The hype can be real, but the idea gets lost. Unsurprisingly, this was the case.
Luckily during some time off, as I was scrolling the timeline looking for gems, I found the OG, GeoffreyHuntley. He explains the concept and the underlying assumptions and premises that make it work. This clicked.
If you’ve experimented with AI and have developed somewhat of a feel about how it goes - this will make sense to you.
Ignore other people’s versions. Explore Geoff’s timeline, watch the YouTube videos, read the blog posts. Pay attention; find the hints. This is just the surface; once you get it, you can see where this road leads.
There are a few excellent resources that help understand and filling some gaps:
Do it from scratch. These are other people’s setups and ideas. Find your own way, understand it.
Working with AI is a skill. The next skill.
Once it clicks, you’ll start getting a weird feeling when you don’t have agents running in the background. “Why don’t I have agents spinning?”
This is enough to get you started. It’s not enough to understand where it ends. Understanding Ralph from first principles simply puts you at the starting line. The one you want to be on.
Now, where does that lead us potentially:
Both are worth reading.
There are no major surprises, nothing you couldn’t see coming, should things continue on the path they seem to go.
Adapt or die.
The thing that jolted me was this one:
But here’s the thing: what people don’t realize is that Ralph is just the beginning. The “AI power users” — the ones who’ve been living in this world for months — are already working with far more refined techniques. And they’re not just building simple things. They’re cloning entire companies in hours.
And then it hits.
Oof.
I’ve seen this, I know this. It’s about speed and compounding advantage. The haze has been lifted. The implications are too large to ignore. I try to be balanced, but the downside of ignoring this and the upside of embracing it are just too large. It’s a bet worth taking.
I had a feeling this was this territory, but dismissed it. I should not have. This isn’t about optimism or pessimism, about hype or anti-hype. We are talking survival.
That one assumption has cost me months of time and experimentation. I should have trusted my gut.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not advocacy, it’s what I see.
We software devs are legendary for our belief in how “right” we are. If you spent any time on tech-oriented forums, you know.
Let me reiterate - I’m not rooting for this to happen; my life/career trajectory was doing just fine. I wasn’t looking for disruption; alas, my feelings on the matter, well, don’t matter. It is simply the case that all my experience and intuition are screaming at me that this is coming.
I’ve learned to trust pattern recognition when it keeps repeating. This one is loud.
You don’t need to agree with this. You just need to decide whether ignoring it is a risk you’re willing to take.
Only the paranoid survive.
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