A Brief History of Ralph

Re:A Brief History of Ralph by wild_egg on Monday January 19, 2026 @01:29PM (#46682680)

It's explained under the July 2025 heading with link to the blog post where it was first shared.

The key bit is right under that though. Ralph is literally just this:

    while :; do cat PROMPT.md | npx --yes @sourcegraph/amp ; done

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Re:A Brief History of Ralph by msla on Monday January 19, 2026 @02:25PM (#46683326)

Surely that would be better written as

    cat PROMPT.md | cat | npx --yes @sourcegraph/amp

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Re:A Brief History of Ralph by GibbonBreath on Monday January 19, 2026 @05:49PM (#46685643)

You've removed the loop. This pipeline executes once and then halts.

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Re:A Brief History of Ralph by wild_egg on Monday January 19, 2026 @07:38PM (#46686520)

Aside from losing the loop (the whole point of the command), why the double `cat`?

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Re:A Brief History of Ralph by mkl on Monday January 19, 2026 @08:17PM (#46686722)

I think it was an attempt at a useless use of cat joke (cat isn't needed at all here, but IMHO helps readability).

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Re:A Brief History of Ralph by skybrian on Monday January 19, 2026 @01:48PM (#46682874)

Thanks!

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Re:A Brief History of Ralph by mkl on Monday January 19, 2026 @08:12PM (#46686691)

This is meaningless without knowing the contents of PROMPT.md. The blog post hides the contents of PROMPT.md in a second subscriber-only post (I don't know if the post's 36 minute video explains anything - 33% in it still hasn't).

https://github.com/repomirrorhq/repomirror/blob/main/repomir... (discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45005434) provides a bit more detail, and prompts, but only seems to use the method for porting existing software.

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