There's a famous Warren Buffett quote:
"If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die."
It's become shorthand for passive income, or making your money work for you. But this week we're sharing our interpretation for the AI age – and it's named after the dumbest kid in Springfield.
Meet Ralph Wiggum
If you've watched The Simpsons, you know Ralph. He's the police chief's son. He eats glue. He says things like "I'm learnding" and "My cat's breath smells like cat food." He is, objectively, not bright.
Ralph in his various elements.
But here's the thing about Ralph: he never stops trying. He's relentlessly optimistic. He fails constantly and just… keeps going. Undeterred. Unaware, maybe. But persistent.
That persistence is now the namesake of one of the most practical developments in AI, and one that we’ve been using (you guessed it) while we sleep.
Ralph Wiggum Is a Feedback Loop
The "Ralph Wiggum" technique is a loop that feeds an AI agent a prompt, lets it fail, and feeds that failure right back in, over and over again until it works.
The technique was invented by Geoffrey Huntley, an open-source developer frustrated by the "human-in-the-loop" bottleneck. Every time the AI made an error, a human had to step in, review, and re-prompt.
His solution: don't protect the AI from its own mess. Force it to confront every failure. If you press the model hard enough against its own mistakes, it will eventually find a correct solution just to escape the loop.
Boris Cherny, Anthropic's Head of Claude Code liked it so much that he formalized the hack into the official ralph-wiggum plugin.
A quick cheat sheet
The Night Shift
Developers are now kicking off Ralph loops before bed and waking up to working code. One developer reportedly completed a $50,000 contract for just $297 in API costs. At a Y Combinator hackathon, someone generated six repositories overnight. Another ran a 14-hour autonomous session that upgraded a codebase from React 16 to React 19, entirely without human input.
These software engineers are sleeping soundly like babies while Claude Code runs for them.
The Catch
Ralph is not magic. It's a technique, and therefore there are use cases where it makes sense and where it doesn’t.
Ralph is great for:
Tasks where you know exactly what "done" looks like
New projects you can leave running overnight
Tasks where the computer can verify if it worked (like passing tests)
The tedious stuff nobody wants to do — migrations, upgrades, boilerplate
Ralph is not great for:
Anything that requires taste or judgment calls
Things you need done right now
Tasks where "good" is subjective
Anything that needs someone else to sign off
The key insight: Ralph works when you can define "done" programmatically. If "done" requires a human to look at it and say "yeah, that feels right," Ralph will spin forever.
Warren Buffet 🤝 Ralph Wiggum
Buffett's quote was always about leverage and finding ways to decouple your income from your time. Assets that work while you rest.
Ralph Wiggum is that, but for cognitive work.
For the first time, you can set up systems that work on hard problems while you sleep, and this goes well beyond "automating the easy stuff." We’re talking about working on complex, multi-step tasks autonomously.
It's not passive income, it's passive problem-solving, but with real, tangible results.
For the right tasks, ones with clear success criteria, it's as close as we've come to making your code work for you.
Now go get some rest. Ralph's got the night shift.
Stay curious,
Julia & Russell
