Ralph Session Operations Reference

Use this skill when a Ralph-v2 agent needs deterministic session-level reference material instead of improvising it from memory.

Use Cases

• Validate metadata.yaml or iterations/<N>/progress.md
• Repair malformed Ralph session state
• Apply the standard subagent timeout recovery ladder
• Generate Ralph session IDs or ISO8601 timestamps

Schema Validation Rules

iterations/<N>/progress.md must include

• # Progress
• ## Legend with [ ], [/], [P], [x], [F], [C]
• ## Planning Progress (Iteration N)
• ## Implementation Progress (Iteration N)

metadata.yaml must include

• version, session_id, created_at, updated_at, iteration
• orchestrator.state
• tasks.total, tasks.completed, tasks.failed, tasks.pending
• session_review.cycle
• session_review.issue_severity_threshold
• session_review.max_critique_cycles

Timeout Recovery Policy

Apply this to any Ralph-v2 subagent call that times out or fails unexpectedly.

1. Retry the same single-mode invocation immediately.
2. Retry after 30 seconds.
3. Retry after 60 seconds.
4. Retry after another 60 seconds.
5. If still failing:
   • If TASK_ID exists, invoke Planner with MODE: SPLIT_TASK and continue with the replacement tasks.
   • If no TASK_ID exists, stop and ask for a narrower scope.

Sleep Commands

• Windows PowerShell: Start-Sleep -Seconds 30 or Start-Sleep -Seconds 60
• Linux/WSL: sleep 30 or sleep 60

Local Timestamp Commands

Session ID format <YYMMDD>-<hhmmss>

• Windows PowerShell: Get-Date -Format "yyMMdd-HHmmss"
• Linux/WSL: TZ=Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh date +"%y%m%d-%H%M%S"

ISO8601 local timestamp

• Windows PowerShell: Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssK"
• Linux/WSL: TZ=Asia/Ho_Chi_Minh date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z"