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Ralphy turns a one-line brief into a rendered UGC video. The default install is dead simple: clone the repo, open Claude Code in it, ask Claude to set you up. From there you chat — Claude reads AGENTS.md, routes to the right playbook, and calls the ralphy CLI for every model call and render. This quickstart gets you from a fresh machine to final.mp4 in roughly ten minutes.

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The 30-second version

git clone https://github.com/alecs5am/ralphy.git ugc-cli
cd ugc-cli
claude
Then in chat: “set me up” → keys, deps, doctor. Then: “make a 15-second TikTok about <X>” → first render.

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The four steps in order

Install

Clone the repo, open Claude Code, ask Claude to set you up. About 3-5 minutes including grabbing two API keys.

Your first video

Type a brief in chat. Ralphy runs intake, generates scenes, renders final.mp4. About 8 minutes cold-start.

Connect your editor

Using Cursor, Copilot, or Codex instead of Claude Code? One command wires the routing in.

What just happened

Walk through every file Ralphy wrote — BRIEF.md, prompts.json, assets/, generations.jsonl, final.mp4.

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What you’ll need

  • A terminal on macOS or Linux. Windows works via WSL.
  • Claude Code on your machine (Cursor / Copilot / Codex also work — see step 3).
  • An OpenRouter key — covers image, video, LLM, vision, transcription.
  • An ElevenLabs key — covers voiceover and music.
You don’t need Vercel, FAL, OpenAI direct, or any other provider. Two keys, one repo, one chat.

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How Ralphy works in one paragraph

You clone ugc-cli and open it in Claude Code. The repo ships AGENTS.md, a routing table the agent reads on every turn. You write a brief like "15-second TikTok about my espresso bar, morning vibe, selfie POV" in chat. Claude matches the brief to a playbook, asks 3-5 clarifying questions, then calls ralphy for every model invocation and render step. Each project lives under workspace/projects/<id>/ with an append-only generation log, so you can replay, branch, and audit costs after the fact. The agent reviews scenes with you before paid generation; nothing burns budget without consent.

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Pick your path

If which ralphy returns nothing and you haven’t cloned the repo yet, start at Install. If ralphy doctor is already green, skip to “Your first video”.