how-to-guide

What Occurs When a Story Fails Quality Checks in Ralph

April 13, 2026 snarktank/ralph ↗

When quality checks fail in Ralph, the AI discards all changes without committing, preserves the story's passes: false status in prd.json, and automatically retries the same story in the next iteration until either the checks succeed or the MAX_ITERATIONS limit is reached.

Ralph is an autonomous coding tool from the snarktank/ralph repository that processes user stories through a strict validation workflow. Understanding its failure handling mechanism is essential for debugging stuck iterations and managing development pipelines. The system implements a "run-quality-checks-then-commit" protocol

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Add to your MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "instagit": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "instagit@latest"]
    }
  }
}

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