You ask an AI assistant to build something, grab coffee, and return to find it stopped three steps in. "Should I continue?" it asks politely. You're not coding anymore. You're babysitting. Checking every five minutes saves nothing.
Then I tried something different: the "Ralph Wiggum Loop." Named after the Simpsons character who cheerfully stumbles through chaos, it's a loop that continuously feeds a PROMPT.md file to Claude Code until infrastructure deploys successfully. Simple, maybe reckless, but it works.
I pointed this loop at a real project: a production-ready URL shortener SaaS on AWS. DynamoDB for storage, Lambda functions for creation and redirection, API Gateway, S3 static hosting, CloudFront with HTTPS, plus a landing page and dashboard.
Claude forgot IAM permissions on the first try. Put Lambda code in the wrong place. Took several attempts to configure CloudFront correctly. But it fixed each mistake and kept iterating.
The final output: working infrastructure, passing tests, and a working frontend.
