Ralphy: an autonomous AI coding loop

What we built

Ralphy is an autonomous coding loop: you give it a task or a full PRD, and it runs an AI coding agent against it, again and again, until the work is actually done. It ships as an npm CLI (ralphy-cli) and an equivalent bash script, and supports six agents: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor Agent, Qwen, and Droid.

Two modes cover most real work:

• Single task: ralphy "fix the auth bug" and walk away.
• PRD mode: point it at a task list (ralphy --prd tasks.md) and it works through the document item by item.

How it's built

The hard part of autonomous coding isn't starting the agent; it's keeping it on the rails across many unattended iterations. Ralphy handles that with a per-project configuration (.ralphy/config.yaml) that travels with the repo:

• Rules the agent must follow on every task, like "use TypeScript strict mode" and "use server actions, not API routes", so standards hold without a human re-stating them each run.
• Boundaries: glob patterns the agent must never touch, protecting legacy code and lockfiles from well-meaning refactors.
• Project commands: test, lint, and build commands the loop runs to verify work before calling a task complete.
• Agent-agnostic design: one harness, six interchangeable agents, so teams can switch models without switching workflows.

Why it matters

With 2,900+ GitHub stars and an active community, Ralphy is one of the most-adopted autonomous agent harnesses in public. It's also a working answer to the question every client asks us: how do you let AI do real work without losing control? Rules, boundaries, and verification, encoded in the tool itself.