Things that happened - January 2026, Week Two

(Published a few days after week two).

I've been reading the Murderbot books and I've been pretty hooked. My wife started reading them, then the series came on Apple TV and I watched it - but I've turned to the books as they are (unsurprisingly) much, much better.

They were written a decade ago and what is described is a pretty accurate description of a system integrating multiple data streams feeding into multiple LLM agents, each with the ability to start multiple sub-agents and write and deploy code. Which sounds pretty familiar to me, in the present.

Anyway I started designing a "HubSystem". This is basically a directory of users (both human and bot), a dynamic collection of communication channels and a whole number of bots - LLM agents that run autonomously, receiving input and posting output to any of the channels they are subscribed to. Then I read about Gastown and thought it sounds conceptually similar too (although aimed purely at coding and HubSystem is a bit more general).

During the week I also heard about Charm for Ruby. Charm is a collection of libraries, written in Go, based upon the Elm framework. But Marco Roth has written ruby bindings for it - meaning that amazing looking, text-based, interactive terminal applications are now easy to build. I'm very excited about this - thanks Marco.

Then I discovered Checkend - a self-hosted error reporting/tracking application. Which is a great thing to have full control over (instead of sending your most vulnerable data over to some third party). Couple that with RailsPulse and that's two important parts of your runtime monitoring that you can bring under your own control.

Finally, I heard about the Ralph Wiggum method for coding agents. And Anthropic released a Ralph Loop plugin, so I thought I'd give it a go. I got Claude to build me a Sveltekit application for tracking my progress using Casey Johnston's training plan.

I've never done any Sveltekit before (beyond a couple of toys), which meant I would not be great at evaluating the quality of the code that Claude produced. And I really like "Outside In" development, with Gherkin stories, nowadays.

So I wrote the stories then got Claude to produce the Javascript steps files and make them pass (using a TDD approach for the rest of the code). This means that, as long as the feature specs pass (driving a real browser via Playwright), I can refactor the rest of the code (or get Claude to do it) without fear. I just made sure that I evaluated the steps files it produced to ensure it was actually doing what the feature required.

This means I get the benefits of vibe coding (quickly building an application in an environment I don't know), but I can apply some software engineering rigour to it. And after reading the steps I did get Claude to change a few things about its implementation. The application isn't quite finished yet - I want to make it a fully offline PWA - but I'll let you know when it's available.

As for Anthropic's Ralph Loop plugin? I'm less than convinced. It just seemed to burn through tokens whilst blindly bashing its head against a wall (which I guess is pretty Ralph Wiggum). And Geoffrey Huntley (who came up with the original idea and name) reckons Anthropic has missed the point - the plugin does not clear the context window following each iteration - meaning it gains no benefits from the Ralph Loop.

Certainly I won't be using Anthropic's plugin again in the near future. But I have known for months that managing the context window is the most important thing you can do with LLM agents, so I'll be building something similar into HubSystem. I'm thinking of saying that the bot has gone to sleep - because humans need sleep to refresh their brains too.