⚠️ Personal Opinion: The views expressed in this blog post are solely my own and do not represent the opinions of any organization or entity I may be affiliated with. And remember, you can always disagree with me!

Yapping about Ralph

I just tried the trending Ralph loop for programming, and somehow ended up walking through the five stages of grief again. I remember having a similar feeling the first time I saw AI-generated art from Mid-journey a few years ago. This time, though, Ralph leaves me even more conflicted.

I’ve long felt that people pushing AI image-generation products don’t really understand what artists need—or worse, don’t even care. They try to replace entire departments with deterministic outputs that lack any real capacity to iterate, yet still claim these tools make artists more productive.

If you genuinely want to integrate cutting-edge AI features into a production pipeline, you eventually have to roll the magic dice and hope for better luck every time. No matter how careful you are, you’ll introduce noise that has nothing to do with your creative intent. In the end, the results tend to feel the same: rich and impressive at first glance, but scattered, incoherent, and hollow once you take a closer look.

Ralph, however, changes the emotional calculus. You don’t really care if it generates a bad implementation in a given output. The control is low, but the oversight is high. Things can always be fixed with another Ralph loop—once you understand where the issue is and what direction the fix might take. At that point, software development starts to feel like it costs about $10.42 an hour, according to Anthropic’s pricing.

AI does produce impressive concept art, and concept artists used to occupy one of the hardest roles in the pipeline. I once aimed for that position myself, like many others. Then AI arrived, and suddenly everyone felt left behind. It forced me to reconsider what art really means to me if I want 3D art to remain part of my life. If I somehow managed to become a concept artist at a major studio, what would that even represent anymore?

There are countless talented people who treated art as the most important thing in their lives long before AI existed. Many of them took the visual language of big studios for granted and spent years chasing those aesthetics, only to see their work absorbed into training data and quietly stripped away. The idea that countless hours of someone’s life can be consumed and diluted so easily makes me deeply sad. Those hours weren’t just labor—they were fragments of people’s lives. Seen this way, working in the industry starts to feel strangely meaningless.

What truly drives me crazy is the audacity to compare this kind of industrial sludge to the work of people who devote their entire lives to personal artistic creation. For some, art is a personal challenge that gives their life structure and meaning. You don’t look for shortcuts in that kind of pursuit. If you really believe the outcome is all that matters, then why not walk up to marathon runners and tell them cars are faster? I can’t tolerate that level of stupidity. I genuinely believe that Van Gogh’s life story adds depth to his work, which is why I can’t help but laugh when people overly praise generated art.

And yet, Ralph gives me mixed feelings.

I do enjoy programming, but I’m not coding to unpack my emotions or express my inner world. (Or maybe I should?) There are parts of my codebase that desperately need improvement—things I never seem to have time to clean up. There are also plenty of side projects I want to build but keep procrastinating on.

If I could put a while loop around those tasks, and let the rest iterate on their own—I might unlock far more possibilities, and then focus on the responsibilities I can’t really avoid. At the same time, I feel conflicted knowing that so many sleepless nights I went through could now be “solved” by brutally wrapping those needs inside a loop.

That possibility overwhelms me. I’ve never felt so left behind. I regret not investing more deeply in the engineering side of software development, and instead focusing too much on implementation details that may soon become trivial or obsolete as agentic coding continues to accelerate. It makes me think about other choices I should have made earlier. This kind of thinking is completely unnecessary, yet remarkably effective at ruining my mood—excellent for mental health.

I probably should have valued my personal time more if I wanted to accomplish anything truly meaningful. I should have treated things more sincerely, and placed my own feelings above external metrics of value and socially imposed definitions of success. I should have created things that can only be made by me instead of trying to prove myself through

Never mind. It is what it is. I will have to keep moving forward.

I’m just dumping these thoughts because they’ve been circling in my head, and I think I might know what I need to work on next. If I want to be the locomotive pulling these agents forward, I need to grind deeper into engineering fundamentals—build more projects, truly understand design patterns and conventions, not just recognize them.

There’s also a human-centric side that matters, but one we rarely have the luxury to focus on: reducing friction in ways that are actually humane, helping individuals solve problems without unnecessary resistance, or creating experiences that simply weren’t possible before. Used correctly, this tooling empowers people like me to do things beyond our individual limits. It really is an amazing tool.

What else is there to say. I have nothing to complain. I’m just getting tired of constantly chasing goals I’m still not very good at, and carrying around this persistent feeling of being incomplete.