Claude Code for everybody
What is Ralph Wiggum?
The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.
Hey folks,
One of my big predictions for this year was “Claude Code for everybody”.
Anthropic’s new research preview, Cowork, is conceptually that. It’s Claude Code with a browser, MCP connectors, skills for documents — i.e. for non-coding work. You could technically do all of this in Claude Desktop before but it’s the abstractions they’ve added to make it more approachable i.e. you don’t need a filesystem MCP now, it just works by selecting a folder.
It’s aimed at non-technical folks, but I think it will make users more technical. Cowork shows the tools, commands and code it writes, so at some point you’ll pick up how agent’s work - and potentially start questioning “whats that command”, “why did you do this” etc. You’ll also notice the context sidepanel - and what is in it and not, which will steer you to think about context engineering.
It’s a very early product with a lot of quirks to be fixed. I tried a couple of things, and it semi works (you can’t create an artifact with AI inside it like you can on claude web). Claire had a some luck. Also, similar to CLI agents, there’s a big and growing number of people who would want custom versions of an app like this. I already saw two of them. Goes back to my ‘personal operating system’ idea and we’re either going to sit in ChatGPT/Claude all day to do work or we’ll want to customise our own apps.
You can make coding agents go on for hours with a plugin called Ralph-wiggum. At the core, it’s just a loop where you start with a big spec document and keep looping through the tasks until everything is done. Anthropic released a plugin for it a couple of weeks ago, but the Ralph creator, Geoffrey Huntley said ‘it’s not it’, so he did a livestream where he talked about the system (for 30 mins) and let Ralph rip for 5 hours adding analytics to his site. Someone else put it to work and built a browser-based UI for SQLite databases.
I created a Ralph skill that you can use with droid, claude code or any agent and try this out. Just point your agent to the repo and say install, then ‘use ralph-skill’. Or Ian built a CLI version which is great.
Gmail is upgrading its Gemini integration in three ways. Suggested Replies, AI Overviews and AI inbox. Suggested Replies show a reply in your voice under an email thread, and they are not bad anymore. AI overviews return a textual answer before the list of emails when you use the search bar in Gmail. The big new feature, “AI Inbox”, creates a daily report of what’s relevant from your entire inbox with priorities and tasks highlighted. The rollout is slow and US first, so you might not see any of these for a few months. Classic Google stuff.
Apple and Google announced that the new Apple Foundation Models will be built on top of Gemini.
Building Voice AI is easy in demos and hard in production. The Speechmatics Startup Program helps founders scale with speech APIs built for real-world audio — accents, cross-talk, background noise, 55+ languages. Accepted startups get up to $50k in credits and Engineering support. Apply for $50k.*
🌐 What I’m consuming
How I write with AI with Wispr Flow, Claude, and Pangram. (not me btw)
Common patterns for agent design that emerged over the past year.
Collaborative Intelligence - treating agents as social participants in the multiplayer systems.
The team at Ramp put claude code in Rollercoaster Tycoon. They also built their own internal coding agent called Inspect. Here’s why.
Exploring how compact conversation works in claude code.
Search the way you think with Dropbox Dash, context-aware AI that connects to all your work apps. With Dash, your work files, messages, and projects are in one simple, secure workspace, so you can search across tools, share with context, and keep work moving without juggling a dozen tabs.*
⚙️ Tools and demos
Radiant is a Mac app that turns meetings into completed work – follow-up emails, summaries, and other work drafted instantly, with no bots.*
Actforge - Let claude code do all your non-coding work.
Stagehand Agent - Automate complex workflows with AI-powered browser agents.
Do Anything - Complete your to-do lists with agents that work, sleep and have their own identity.
Better Shot - Open-source, native macOS screenshot tool. Local and free.
Livedocs - A general data agent that works with your spreadsheets, databases and more.
🥣 Dev Dish
CallMe, a minimal plugin that lets Claude Code call you on the phone.
bash-tool - A dedicated, robust tool for agents to use filesystems and bash.
ralph-tui - Connect your coding agent to your task tracker and see agents work in a terminal UI.
nanocode - A minimal claude code alternative written in Python.
CodexMonitor - MacOS app for running multiple Codex agents with access to your device.
Agentboard - Web UI for tmux, optimised for agent TUIs. I think related to running agents from your phone.
🍦 Afters
UI Skills - Opinionated constraints for building better interfaces with agents.
A skill to let Claude Code fine-tune a model using Thinking Machines’ Tinker.
OpenAI acquired Torch, a one-year-old, 4-person company, to work on ChatGPT health.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
Thanks to today’s sponsors who made this newsletter possible :)
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