Everyone keeps saying “Ralph Wiggum” like it’s a meme (it is), but it’s also the clearest coding loop I’ve seen for getting to legit sleep-shipping. In this episode I brought on Ryan Carson to break down how Ralph actually works: you don’t “vibe code” one giant prompt. You turn a feature into a PRD, convert it into tiny user stories with tight acceptance criteria, then run a looped script that pulls one ticket at a time, implements it, tests it, commits it, and marks pass/fail. The magic is the reset. Each iteration starts fresh with a clean context window instead of one messy, never-ending chat thread. That’s why this feels like a Kanban board: pull a sticky note, ship it, go back for the next one. And it’s surprisingly affordable—Ryan shows real runs that cost a few bucks per iteration, maybe ~$30 for a full cycle. The part you can’t skip: spend real time on the PRD + acceptance criteria. If your stories are atomic and verifiable, Claude (Ryan’s using Opus 4.5) can execute like a high-quality engineering team. Add memory with agents.md (long-term notes) and progress.txt (short-term iteration context), and you get a workflow that compounds instead of repeating the same mistakes.