Background
I’m Michael Arnaldi, Founder and CEO of Effectful Technologies — the company behind Effect, the TypeScript library for building production-grade systems. I’ve been programming most of my life. I started at 11 with the goal of cracking video games. Since then, I’ve written code at every level: from kernel development to the highest abstractions in TypeScript.
Programming has been my life. And now it’s gone for good.
Let me explain.
The Ralph Wiggum Moment
The broader community is only now waking up to the power of AI. Last week, Ralph Wiggum went viral. Ralph is a technique that prompts agents like Claude Code in a deterministic loop, iteratively building large systems from lists of small tasks. Twitter exploded.
The name comes from Geoffrey Huntley, a great engineer and a good friend who’s been exploring the extremes of AI for a long time.
But here’s the thing: what people don’t realize is that Ralph is just the beginning. The “AI power users” — the ones who’ve been living in this world for months — are already working with far more refined techniques. And they’re not just building simple things. They’re cloning entire companies in hours.
Missing the Point
The average software developer is not even close to understanding the extent of this change.
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