Constraining the Coding Agent: The Ralph Loop and Why Determinism Matters

In late 2025, agentic coding tools went from impressive demos to daily infrastructure. The problem nobody talked about enough: when an LLM agent has write access to a codebase and no formal constraints, reproducibility breaks down. The Ralph Loop is a deterministic, story-driven execution framework that addresses this — one tool call per story, scoped writes, atomic state. A design rationale with a formal sketch of why the constraints matter.

4 December 2025 · 9 min · Sebastian Spicker

The Papertrail: AI PDF Renaming and the Tokens That Make It Interesting

Everyone has a Downloads folder full of “scan0023.pdf” and “document(3)-final-FINAL.pdf”. Renaming them by content sounds trivial — read the file, understand what it is, give it a name. The implementation reveals something useful about how LLMs actually handle text: what a token is, why context windows matter in practice, why you want structured output instead of prose, and why heuristics should go first. The repository is at github.com/sebastianspicker/AI-PDF-Renamer.

22 March 2025 · 9 min · Sebastian Spicker