Design — radioactive-ralph

Vision

radioactive-ralph is a little orchestration creature with a lot of different personalities who really wants to help any way he can.

The product should feel like:

• one binary you install

• one repo you initialize

• one durable planning/runtime surface

• many personalities you can ask Ralph to inhabit

The simplification

The repo got into trouble by trying to support too many identities at once:

• plugin

• marketplace add-on packaging

• binary

• HTTP MCP server

• provider-specific implementation

• provider-agnostic future

That is too many stories for one tool.

The correct story is:

• binary first

• personas in code

• Claude via MCP

• provider abstraction later

Personality matters

The personalities are not fluff. They are a usable operator model.

Green, grey, red, blue, professor, fixit, immortal, savage, old-man, and world-breaker are different ways Ralph can help. The product should preserve that voice and intent while keeping the implementation source of truth inside the binary.

Provider direction

The long-term design goal is a declarative provider layer in repo config so a repo can bind Ralph to whatever agent CLI it wants, provided it defines:

• how to run the tool

• how to set model

• how to set effort

• how to append the persona/system prompt

• how to pass the operator/user prompt

• what structured output format the runtime should parse

Claude is simply the first supported provider.