Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.

Browse all series

Coming Soon

The Ralph Wiggum Technique

Join me in as we perform a deep-dive into the agentic looping technique known as "Ralph Wiggum." As we go, we’re not just building a script, we’re building the surrounding system that makes an agent reliable enough to collaborate with. We’ll work through permissions, sandbox rules, hooks, and safer ways to run in more autonomous modes.

By the end, we’ll have something much bigger than a typical demo: a working approach for spec-driven agent development that can run locally, in the background, or on a remote machine over SSH. Let's go!

Launching May 18, 2026

Progress

Series Info

Episodes
16
Run Time
1h 56m
Difficulty
Intermediate
Last Updated
May 18, 2026
Version
Latest

Series Episodes

  1. Episodes (5)

    1. What Is Ralph?

      Let’s kick things off by building a simple Ralph.sh loop and seeing how this agentic workflow actually works in practice. We’re not trying to make it fancy yet, just to understand why restarting the model with lightweight memory files like project.md and progress.md can be such a powerful way to ship work.

    2. Improving Our First Ralph Loop

      Now that we have our basic ralph loop in place, let's make it feel a lot less blind by surfacing what the model is doing in real time. We'll move from the old shell script to a small Node.js wrapper that can parse stream-json output into something actually readable while keeping the same overall loop architecture.

    3. What Is A PRD?

      Now that we have a feel for the onboarding problem, we’re going to step back and shape an agent-ready PRD that gives the model the right context, constraints, and success criteria before it writes a single line of code. The goal here is to front load the important decisions so our loop can execute with far less guesswork and a much better shot at shipping the right thing.

    4. Creating A PRD With Our PRD Skill

      Now that we have our PRD skill in place, we are going to put it to work and see how a well scoped spec can drive an agent through a real feature build. Along the way, we will refine the generated plan a bit, feed it into our rel.js loop, and check whether the end result actually holds up in the app.

    5. Running Ralph In The Background

      Let's take a minute to make our terminal setup a lot more resilient so we do not lose long running work every time we accidentally close a window. We will get comfortable with screen and tmux, with extra attention on a simple tmux workflow that lets us keep multiple loops and tools running in the background.

Launching May 18, 2026

Continue Learning

So You Want to Build an Agent thumbnail

So You Want to Build an Agent

With Jeffrey Way

You're likely using an AI agent every day at this point, but do you truly understand how it works under the hood? What separates an agent from a general chat? What's a tool? How do we provide the loop for executing these tools? In this series, we'll demystify some of these concepts by building a basic agent that is capable of interacting with your file system and triggering tools.

  • 9 Episodes
The Batteries-Included AI Toolkit thumbnail

The Batteries-Included AI Toolkit

With Jeremy McPeak

The Laravel AI SDK is a first-party toolkit for adding AI features to your applications. Using a helpdesk app as our playground, you’ll learn structured output, chat with memory, streaming, tool use, retrieval, and everything else you need to build AI features that are reliable, testable, and ready for production. This is an incredibly powerful toolkit, and I can't wait to show you what you can build. Let's get going!

  • 13 Episodes
Watch Me AI the UI thumbnail

Watch Me AI the UI

With Jeffrey Way

In this workshop, come along as I upgrade the visual design of our Laracasts team dashboard. As you'll see, design work can sometimes be a bit tricky to orchestrate. Can AI properly evaluate a screenshot and convert it to CSS? Well, yes...and no! But luckily, we have a variety of techniques we can use to increase our odds of success. Let's go!

  • 5 Episodes
AI Developer Workflows thumbnail

AI Developer Workflows

With Jeffrey Way

It's a brand new world. Suddenly, we find ourselves less writing code line by line, and more writing plans, coordinating agents, and building workflows. There's a lot to learn. But we gotcha!In this series, each episode will demonstrate one potential AI workflow that you might adopt in your own projects. Check back often, as we'll be adding new episodes every month.

  • 3 Episodes
Leveraging AI for Laravel Development thumbnail

Leveraging AI for Laravel Development

With Jeffrey Way

The web development world forever changed in December, 2025. This was the month when we realized just how powerful and useful LLMs had truly become. And there's no turning back. It's time to get on board! This train isn't stopping. Join me, as I get you up to speed in record time. Learn about Jetbrains AI, agents, prompting, vibe coding, developer-driven AI, Ralph Wiggum, and a wealth of tips and techniques to drastically speed up your workflow. Let's go!

  • 18 Episodes