Live data from Hacker News

Crush: Glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal

github.com

11–20 of 240 posts

Re: Crush: Glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal

#11
post #6

I don't get why terminal agents are so popular of late. Having spent more than a decade in terminal based development (vi*), and now fully moved over to a real IDE (vs code), it seems bonkers to me. The IDE is so much more... integrated

At this point, TUI's still feel like the most streamlined interface for coding agents. They're inherently lighter weight, and generally more true to the context of dev environments.

Re: Crush: Glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal

#13
post #6

I don't get why terminal agents are so popular of late. Having spent more than a decade in terminal based development (vi*), and now fully moved over to a real IDE (vs code), it seems bonkers to me. The IDE is so much more... integrated

Not new to AI agents, either. I'm sure you can set up vim to be like an IDE, but unless you're coding over ssh, I don't know why it's preferable to an actual IDE (even one with vim bindings). GUIs are just better for many things.

If the optimal way to do a particular thing is a grid of rectangular characters with no mouse input, nothing prevents you having one of those in your GUI where it makes sense.

For instance, you can look up the documentation for which keys to press to build your project in your TUI IDE, or you can click the button that says "build" (and hover over the button to see which key to press next time). Why is typing :q better than clicking the "X" in the top-right corner? Obviously, the former works over ssh, but that's about it.

Slowness is an implementation detail. If MSVC6 can run fast enough on a computer from 1999 (including parsing C++) then we should be able to run things very fast today.

Re: Crush: Glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal

#15
post #6

I don't get why terminal agents are so popular of late. Having spent more than a decade in terminal based development (vi*), and now fully moved over to a real IDE (vs code), it seems bonkers to me. The IDE is so much more... integrated

Because integrating directly with very large varities of editors & environments is actually kind of hard? Everyone has their own favorite development environment, and by pulling the LLM agents into a separate area (i.e. a terminal app) then you can quickly get to "works in all environments". Additionally, this also implies "works with no dev environment at all". For example, vibe coding a simple HTML only webpage. All you need is terminal+browser.

Re: Crush: Glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal

#17
post #7

The big question - which one of these new agents can consume local models to a reasonable degree? I would like to ditch the dependency on external APIs - willing to trade some performance in lieu.

Crush has an open issue (2 weeks) to add Ollama support - it's in progress.

Re: Crush: Glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal

#19
post #3

looks cool - has anyone compared it to opencode[^1] yet? [1]: https://github.com/sst/opencode

One big benefit of opencode is that it lets you authenticate to GitHub Copilot. This lets you switch between all the various models Copilot supports, which is really nice.

Re: Crush: Glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal

#20
post #6

I don't get why terminal agents are so popular of late. Having spent more than a decade in terminal based development (vi*), and now fully moved over to a real IDE (vs code), it seems bonkers to me. The IDE is so much more... integrated

I like them because the interface is consistent regardless of what editor/IDE I'm using. Also frequently I use it to do stuff like convert files, or look at a structure and then make a shell script to modify it in some way, in which case an IDE is just overhead, and the output is just something I would run in the terminal anyway.
Post reply on HN