Software engineering
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2026
1 article2025
2 articles- 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 story-driven harness intended to bound that variability through one model invocation per attempt, scoped writes, and atomic state. These constraints make runs easier to inspect; they do not make an unpinned model deterministic.
- 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 project, now called Folionym, is at github.com/sebastianspicker/folionym.