Templates

Vibe-reference and vibe-style templates, organized into five segment-persona categories.

A template is a pre-built scaffold for a kind of video. Ralphy ships 54 templates across five segment-persona categories. Two kinds exist: vibe-reference (full-stack production templates with a composition.md, a reference example, and a manifest) and vibe-style (prompt cookbooks with hooks, camera vocab, and worked example prompts). The agent’s first move on any new brief is ralphy template suggest "<the user's brief>" — if the top hit scores ≥ 0.5, use the template instead of improvising (AGENTS.md hard invariant #10, surfaced in docs/playbooks/meta.md rule 3).

The two kinds

Vibe-reference (5 in repo). A complete production template — composition.md describing scene-by-scene structure, model-stack.md naming the image / video / VO / music picks, reference-example.md linking to a rendered mp4 that exemplifies the format, fragments.md of reusable prompt fragments, and a template.json manifest. The five today:

• before-after-product (DTC) — 5s pain → 1s reveal → 9s demo
• talking-head-rant (creator) — deadpan 15-22s monolog
• podcast-clip (creator) — long-form podcast → 15-60s viral cut
• ai-vegetables (entertainment) — surrealist POV of an anthropomorphic vegetable
• ai-drama (entertainment) — Pixar-3D fruit / object / animal mini-soap-opera

Vibe-style (49 in repo). A prompt cookbook — hooks.md (validated opener patterns), prompt-cookbook.md (camera vocabulary, lighting, color grades, worked example prompts), and a template.json. No baked composition. The art-director playbook reads the cookbook before drafting prompts. Examples: pov-first-person, grwm, yap-talking-head, italian-brainrot, cinematic, analog-horror-psa.

The split is intentional: when a format has a load-bearing structural pattern (5s + 1s + 9s, or 7 × 8s clips with one music drop), it earns a vibe-reference template. When the format is a register (cinematic, anime-action, ASMR), it stays vibe-style.

The five categories

Templates are organized by segment × persona — who is watching the content and why. Pick the category that matches the audience archetype.

Category	Count	Audience	Goal	Tone
b2b-saas/	7	Decision-makers, ops, marketers, founders	Educate, build authority, drive demo	Confident, didactic, ROI-aware
dtc-commerce/	12	Online shoppers (apparel, beauty, nutra, gadgets, food)	Conversion	Aspirational, peer-evidence, demo-led
creator-lifestyle/	10	Scroll-feed lifestyle / personality-driven	Parasocial connection, native placement	Relatable, first-person, unpolished-by-design
entertainment-viral/	15	Passive scroll-feed / meme / brainrot	Pure attention, share, dwell	Punchy, surreal, AI-native
cinematic-narrative/	11	Aesthetics-first / film-quality	Brand prestige, emotional resonance	Directorial, deliberate

Browse the full roster on the public Library, or run ralphy template list -p.

Where templates live

Two tiers, both read by the same loader.

public content library            # Supabase template blocks (hosted)
                                   # served by /library + read via cli/lib/library/client.ts

workspace/templates/              # user-local, gitignored
├── my-internal-template/
└── ...

The public content library holds the shipped catalog (the same library the /library landing serves). The user-local workspace/templates/ stays flat. The repo-public templates/<category>/<slug>/ folder was retired in #084 — templates are no longer committed to git here. The loader resolves by slug across both tiers — ralphy template use before-after-product --project <id> works whether the slug is a public-library template or lives at workspace/templates/before-after-product/.

Workspace overrides the public tier on id collision. If you ralphy template extract a project into workspace/templates/<slug>/ and edit it, the local version wins. The public tier degrades gracefully when the library is unreachable — the CLI lists workspace templates only and prints a warning.

The slug system

A slug is a kebab-case identifier — before-after-product, pov-first-person, italian-brainrot. Slugs are unique across the entire template set (repo + workspace).

ralphy template list                          # every slug, with category and kind
ralphy template list --category dtc-commerce  # filter by category
ralphy template list --kind vibe-reference    # filter by kind
ralphy template show <slug>                   # the raw TEMPLATE.md (pipe-friendly)
ralphy template suggest "<utterance>"          # rank by user-brief
ralphy template use <slug> --project <id>      # scaffold a project from the template
ralphy template register <slug>                # add a new template to the registry

ralphy template suggest is the most important verb of the set. It takes a user utterance (“I want a TikTok about my coffee shop’s pastry”) and ranks templates by a composite of slug-keyword-match, tag-overlap, and category-fit. A score ≥ 0.5 means “use this template.” A score < 0.3 means “no template fits — fall through to a generic generation flow.”

The suggest verb is the gate against improvisation. 54 templates ship; the chance that a “new” brief is actually a known format is high.

Example slug roster

Here is a representative slice — browse the full roster on the public Library or run ralphy template list -p.

b2b-saas/

• yap-talking-head — Hormozi / Codie raw-energy single-idea education
• tutorial-how-to — Hoyos-method 3-step search-first tutorial
• listicle — “Top N X” with big counter and #1 cliffhanger
• faceless-voiceover — AI / live VO over b-roll
• interview-dialog — two-person dialog with two voice IDs

dtc-commerce/

• before-after-product (vibe-reference) — most reliably converting UGC pattern
• doctor-authority — white-coat authority + mechanism explainer
• try-on — virtual try-on with mirror-flash multi-variant
• multi-scene-product-launch — 27-shot identity-locked branded-hardware launch (derived from nothing-hp1-001)
• ugc-selfie-product-review — handheld 9:16 UGC selfie (derived from glitter-cream-001)

creator-lifestyle/

• pov-first-person — “POV: you just…” — highest share-rate format
• grwm — Get Ready With Me, dual-layer storytime + visual
• storytime — selfie talking-head with rising tension + pattern-interrupts
• noski-deadpan-2hander — @americanbaron deadpan register (derived from noski-people-001)
• podcast-clip (vibe-reference) — long-form → 15-60s viral cuts

entertainment-viral/

• italian-brainrot — single-character AI-meme with Italian gibberish VO (uses the 33-character canonical pool)
• brainrot-ai-meme — split-screen AI VO + Subway Surfers / Minecraft Parkour loop
• analog-horror-psa — 30s EBS-style emergency-broadcast PSA (derived from analog-horror-fridge-001)
• broadcast-caught-on-tv-square — 1:1 square caught-on-live-broadcast realism (derived from kbo-broadcast-001)
• found-footage-mockumentary — first-person handheld occult mockumentary (derived from occult-mockumentary-001)

cinematic-narrative/

• cinematic — blockbuster film-look, 12 hooks, 16-move camera vocab
• tokyo-y2k-cinematic — long-form 75s locked-off-tripod neon-Asian-metropolis (derived from tokyo-y2k-001)
• pixel-art-product-reveal — photoreal hero device as only chroma in duotone world (derived from playdate-pixel-001)
• comic-spiderverse-action — painterly action duel in Spider-Verse / Arcane register
• japanese-hypermotion-product-ad — 15s 8-hard-cut hyperpop product ad

Templates derived from shipped projects

Eleven templates in the catalog were extracted from shipped projects — the agent finished a video, the postmortem identified a reusable pattern, and the team promoted the structure into a template. These ship under a unified schema (structured slots, sourceProject pointer, doNotCopyLiterally rationale) so the next user gets the structure without inheriting the specific brief. The roster:

Template	Source project
broadcast-caught-on-tv-square	kbo-broadcast-001
analog-horror-psa	analog-horror-fridge-001
noski-deadpan-2hander	noski-people-001
tokyo-y2k-cinematic	tokyo-y2k-001
pixel-art-product-reveal	playdate-pixel-001
japanese-hypermotion-product-ad	flipper-hypermotion-001
comic-spiderverse-action	skater-spiderverse-001
found-footage-mockumentary	occult-mockumentary-001
anthropomorphic-object-drama	fruit-drama-001
ugc-selfie-product-review	glitter-cream-001
multi-scene-product-launch	nothing-hp1-001

The sourceProject pointer means the agent can re-read the original project’s postmortem (workspace/projects/<source>/postmortem/02-lessons.md) before scaffolding a new project from the template. Per meta.md rule 1, this is the “highest-leverage 10 minutes” of a session.

The scaffold flow

# 1. Suggest a template from the brief.
ralphy template suggest "I want a TikTok about my coffee shop's new pastry"
# → before-after-product (score 0.61, dtc-commerce, vibe-reference)
# → food-beverage (score 0.42, dtc-commerce, vibe-style)
# → pov-first-person (score 0.29, creator-lifestyle, vibe-style)

# 2. Read the template doc (raw TEMPLATE.md).
ralphy template show before-after-product

# 3. Scaffold a project.
ralphy template use before-after-product \
  --project coffee-shop-001 \
  --brief "Lumen Coffee's new croissant — 15s ad"

# 4. The template pulls any required assets from the companion repo
#    automatically (e.g. brainrot-ai-meme pulls cs-surf-loop.mp4).

After template use, the project has a BRIEF.md, a draft STORYBOARD.md, and a prompts.json skeleton. The agent then chains scenarist → art-director → editor to fill in the rest.

Adding a new template

Author a template into your user-local workspace tier, then publish it onward to the public library.

# 1. Extract a finished project into workspace/templates/<slug>/ (or hand-author the folder there).
ralphy template extract <project-id> --slug <slug> --category <category>

# 2. Register.
ralphy template register <slug>

# 3. Verify suggest finds it with score ≥ 0.5 for the canonical utterance.
ralphy template suggest "<the brief that should land on this template>"

To make it discoverable in the public Library, publish it via the templater / dev-publish-template path (Supabase + the open-source published.ts).

Related

• Library — browse every published template + unit
• Asset catalog — ralphy template use pulls required assets from the companion repo
• Projects — what a scaffolded project looks like on disk
• Asset catalog — ralphy template use pulls required assets from the companion repo
• Projects — what a scaffolded project looks like on disk
• /advanced/template-format — the YAML / JSON schema for template.json