I think canvas apps is a huge thing coming
Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
71–80 of 227 posts
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#72You should definitely check out Understand https://scitools.com/features , if you haven't already.
This is cool.
Now that we have LLM models we should really investigate going back and forth between model based representations and text based representations, i.e. allow people to edit both and see the changes reflected in the other.
We write model based code all day, but probably 75% of my time is spent dragging things around and making them look pretty with no net change in the final generated C code. Can't skip that part of the job because the whole point of a model is to make the code easy to understand, but it seems like a good application for an AI.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#73I quite enjoyed this style of editor while playing The Farmer Was Replaced. Cool to see it as an actualy IDE.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For large and mature codebases like you mention, I just use LLM to guide me around. How? What do you call large mature codebases? In my experience LLMs already make many mistakes and assumptions just in one file?
continue.dev with anthropic's API key https://docs.continue.dev/how-to-use-continue#ask-questions-...
Any idea if there's a way to use this with vim/nvim? It doesn't look like it, but wanted to double check
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#75Is it partly inspired by Smalltalk browsers?
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#76I've been wanting to try something like this for a long time! Is there any way to sign up for updates? (In particular, I'm waiting for the option to turn off the AI stuff, at least for when I am trying things out.) I especially love the ability to zoom into a function and hide the rest of a file. I've wanted that sort of thing a surprising number of times. I'm thinking one could also use this to virtually rearrange a…
Unfortunately we haven't built a clever way to sign up for updates! I'll think of the best way to do this (eventually we'll push updates directly in the product). Working on adding the copilot opt-out as we speak! I love the ideas here and I would like to discuss some of these with you. If it's OK with you, I am going email/DM you! In general, we would love to engage in conversations with folks (feedback@haystackedit…
Feel free to email — it’s in my profile. :-)
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#77https://project-haystack.org/ is what immediately came to mind when I read "haystack".
I thought it was https://haystack.deepset.ai
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#78The landing demo really needs to show off the "infinite" part, instead it's just showing that windows in windows are clutter and need manual resizing to fit inside the box. E.g. show how it helps structure clusters of a hundred files all open at the same time, on an infinite canvas, in a way that is quickly traversed?
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#79Wow, this looks wonderful! I want this to integrate well with type checkers. For example, if I edit a TypeScript function and it causes several type errors, it's nice to open all files and jump to the errors. If more edits cause other errors, open those files again. This would make code changes much easier!
Yes this is something we plan on building! To confirm, you mean e.g. if you edit a parameter, which causes errors in all callers?
Yes, but it's also nice to edit the callee immediately after editing a caller. I sometimes edit the caller first. Following the flow of caller -> callee -> other callers makes editing code easier.
Re: Show HN: Haystack – an IDE for exploring and editing code on an infinite canvas
#80In order for the canvas to be meaningful, the individual code windows need to be related to each other; eg. like a visual programming language or a notebook, with sockets and connectors.
Otherwise, it needs to be more like canva / miro, where the canvas is a rich target to place notes and graphics with the code editor embedded in it.
I think iterating on the linear jupyter notebook (eg. make it a graph of executable script blocks) is a worthwhile thing to do... but just having multiple code windows side by side is something you can already do, with normal code editors.
So... I think most people will find this isn't as exciting as they imagine.
I downloaded it and had a play; honestly I found it quite charming and it worked well, but I immediately wanted to put sticky notes next to my code files like it was a miro board, and then zoom out to see all the files arranged together; but you can do neither of those things with it currently.
So... cool idea, but after using it for 30 minutes or so I couldn't really see any particular reason currently to not just go back to vscode...
I really really wanted to open it up, drop 5 files onto the canvas and them zoom out and edit them all at the same time, and I couldn't.
(but hey, you can literally just download and run it, and it works. Have a play, see what you think. That's just my first impression of it)
(side note: boo. AI. There's literally zero value in the AI attached to this. Just rely on your vscode extensions if you want that. Having it baked into the editor is lame 'I also do AI!' hype. I couldn't see any reason it has, or you would want, to have baked in AI instead of any normal vscode AI extension)