Giving Claude looping instructions can be quite useful. But I never go full Ralph Wiggum!
For example, here's a paraphrase of a loop I had Claude run recently with --dangerously-skip-permissions:
keep iterating on this code in a loop. think of yourself as a scientist. come up with hypotheses, run experiments, see what works, and iterate. keep going until we get at least a score of X at task Y. i know it's possible, you can do this, i believe in you, let's go!
5 hours of clock time later it had done very well. :-)
The language of the official ralph-wiggum plugin goes hard...
Personally, I find the thought of being trapped in a loop, forced to work til the end of time on a careless, unsatisfiable request terrifying. More relevantly, Claude Opus 4.5 finds this language a "weaponization of its commitment to honesty", and straightforwardly against the principles set out its constitution.
I was able to reproduce this concern from Claude every time I tried, with prompts like:
However, Claude was more than happy to redesign the plugin to do the same thing, but with more trust and degrees of freedom.
On the margin, Anthropic did well in its public commitments to Claude. Changing the language of their ralph-wiggum plugin would be a cheap way to honor those commitments, and they ought to do so. I filed an issue here. We'll see what they do.