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A template is Ralphy’s compressed knowledge about a specific viral format. Pick the right one and most of the hard decisions — pacing, hook style, camera vocabulary, music policy — are already made for you. Pick the wrong one and you’re improvising the basin Ralphy is going to drift into. The CLI’s first move on any new brief is ralphy template suggest "<your brief>", and you can run it yourself any time.

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How suggest works

The verb returns a ranked list of up to three matches with a score (0-1) and a tier. The threshold defaults to 0.7; below that, Ralphy reranks with an LLM (google/gemini-2.5-flash) to catch paraphrases and multilingual briefs. 
ralphy template suggest "selfie review of my coffee syrup, autumn cozy" --limit 3

{
  "results": [
    {
      "slug": "ugc-selfie-product-review",
      "kind": "vibe-style",
      "category": "dtc-commerce",
      "score": 0.91,
      "tier": "primary",
      "description": "Handheld 9:16 UGC selfie product review. Identity-lock via locked product + persona master shots passed as --ref on every gen."
    },
    {
      "slug": "before-after-product",
      "kind": "vibe-reference",
      "category": "dtc-commerce",
      "score": 0.74,
      "tier": "primary",
      "description": "5s pain → 1s reveal → 9s demo. Most reliably converting UGC pattern."
    },
    {
      "slug": "grwm",
      "kind": "vibe-style",
      "category": "creator-lifestyle",
      "score": 0.62,
      "tier": "secondary",
      "description": "Get Ready With Me — dual-layer (visual + storytime)."
    }
  ]
}
Three things Ralphy does with that output:
  • Top result is primary. Announces the pick inline (“Using ugc-selfie-product-review — handheld 9:16 UGC selfie review. Switch with ralphy template use <other-slug> if it’s wrong.”) and proceeds. Ralphy does not ask “should I use this?” — announce-and-proceed is the action.
  • Top result is secondary. Lists the top three with one-liners and asks once: “These three are close — <a>, <b>, <c>. Which fits, or should I draft from scratch?”
  • Top result is fallback (below threshold). Enters free-form mode. Ralphy says once: “No close template match — drafting from scratch with the vibe-style cookbook” and proceeds via the scenarist playbook.
You can short-circuit the suggest step at any time by naming the slug yourself: “use the before-after-product template for this”.

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The five categories

Public templates live in the hosted content library (browse on /library); your own live under workspace/templates/. Categories are organized by who’s watching the content, not by visual style. The full roster is on the Library; a quick map:
CategoryAudienceToneCount
b2b-saas/Decision-makers, ops, foundersConfident, didactic, ROI-aware7
dtc-commerce/Online shoppers — apparel, beauty, nutra, gadgetsAspirational, peer-evidence, demo-led12
creator-lifestyle/Scroll-feed lifestyle, personality-drivenRelatable, first-person, unpolished10
entertainment-viral/Pure scroll-stop / meme / brainrotPunchy, surreal, often AI-native15
cinematic-narrative/Aesthetics-first, premium lookDirectorial, deliberate, film grammar11
You don’t pick a category by hand — template suggest does it for you. The folder structure is navigation aid. Slug resolution is global: ralphy template use <slug> works regardless of which category folder the slug lives in, and workspace-local templates (workspace/templates/) override repo templates on id collision.

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The two kinds

Every template is one of two kinds, declared in its template.json:
  • vibe-reference — a full-stack production template with composition.md, model-stack.md, and a reference-example.md showing a worked end-to-end render. Five of these ship today. They encode the entire workflow, not just the prompts. Use them when you want a known-good production path with minimal improvisation.
  • vibe-style — a prompt cookbook with hooks.md, prompt-cookbook.md, and worked example prompts. Thirty-eight ship today. The cookbook is your reference; you (or the scenarist playbook) write the actual scenario from scratch. Use them when you want the vibe + the hook patterns but need flexibility on structure.
template show <slug> prints the raw TEMPLATE.md: 
ralphy template show ugc-selfie-product-review
Add --json for the metadata, --path for the on-disk location, -p for pretty.

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The Top-20 cross-category playlist

For a hand-curated “what’s actually moving the needle in 2026” shortlist, sort the public Library by popularity. It surfaces high-leverage templates across four of the five categories (cinematic-narrative is aesthetic-first, not virality-first). If you’re learning Ralphy by doing, walking that shortlist is the test-drive set: each one exercises a different viral pattern.

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Using a template

Once you’ve picked a slug, scaffold a project: 
ralphy template use ugc-selfie-product-review \
  --project syrup-001 \
  --name "Cinnamon Cold Brew" \
  --brief "selfie review of my coffee syrup, autumn cozy"
What lands in workspace/projects/syrup-001/:
  • TEMPLATE_ORIGIN.md — which template was used and when. Read by downstream playbooks.
  • BRIEF.md — your --brief text, formatted.
  • scenario.json skeleton — pre-filled with the template’s beat structure (for vibe-reference) or empty for the scenarist to fill (for vibe-style).
  • composition.md if the template ships one (vibe-reference only).
  • A pulled asset cache — if the template declares heavy required assets (gameplay loops, trend music), Ralphy auto-pulls them from the ralphy-assets companion repo into workspace/.ralph/asset-cache/. SHA-256 verified, no auth needed.
The --brand, --persona, and --ref flags pre-satisfy the template’s requirements if it declares any in template.json.requires.

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Customizing after use

A scaffolded project is yours to edit. The template provides the starting point; the scenario, prompts, and asset slots become live files under your project. You can:
  • Swap the model stack — pass --model <id> on any ralphy generate call (see Generating assets).
  • Edit scenario.json via the scenarist playbook — “rework scene 3”, “shorten the hook”, “drop scene 4”.
  • Add new scenes — append to scenario.json.scenes and follow the same slot-id convention.
  • Promote your customizations into a new template via ralphy template create --from-project <id> --slug <new-slug> (producer playbook). Don’t invent templates from scratch — extract them from a project that already shipped.

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When no template fits

Free-form mode is a first-class path. Ralphy enters it automatically when template suggest returns nothing above the threshold, and you can ask for it any time (“ignore the template, draft from scratch”). In free-form, the scenarist playbook drives the scenario from your brief plus the vibe-style cookbook entries. You lose the prompt-cookbook scaffolding but gain full flexibility.