How Ralph makes Claude Code actually finish tasks

Claude Code is an agentic AI system that autonomously navigates, writes, and tests code but often lacks the ability to determine when a task is complete, leading to unnecessary continuation and resource consumption. This completion problem is exacerbated by vague prompts, which leave the AI without clear signals to stop, causing it to add features beyond the original requirements. Ralph addresses this by providing explicit control structures such as exit gates, circuit breakers, and prompt-driven completion criteria, ensuring tasks eventually terminate. An experiment comparing Claude Code and Ralph across different scenarios highlighted that prompt specificity is crucial to defining task scope and efficiently guiding the AI to completion. While Ralph's architecture provides structural guarantees against indefinite execution, the ultimate responsibility for defining "done" lies with the person crafting the prompt, emphasizing that human input is essential in engineering completion within agentic AI systems.