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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

mitchellh.com

41–50 of 160 posts

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#41

Haven’t used Ghostty but why is HN putting it on front page every other week? What’s the main attraction to it

Product merits aside… Its developer is a celebrity figure and people here are captivated by the story of a billionaire who writes open source without a business model, like we regular folks do when we don’t have a hustle to focus on

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#42
post #5

Tip: I very often use AI for inspiration. In this case, I ended up keeping a lot (not all) of the UI code it made, but I will very often prompt an agent, throw away everything it did, and redo it myself (manually!). I find the "zero to one" stage of creation very difficult and time consuming and AI is excellent at being my muse. This right here is the single biggest win for coding agents. I see and directionally agre…

Just this week I watched an interview with Mitchell about his dev setup and when asked about using neovim instead of an IDE he said something along the lines of "I don't want something that writes code for me". I'm not pointing this out as a criticism, but rather that it's worth taking note that an accomplished developer like him sees value in LLMs that he didn't see in previous intellisense-like tooling.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#43
post #5

Tip: I very often use AI for inspiration. In this case, I ended up keeping a lot (not all) of the UI code it made, but I will very often prompt an agent, throw away everything it did, and redo it myself (manually!). I find the "zero to one" stage of creation very difficult and time consuming and AI is excellent at being my muse. This right here is the single biggest win for coding agents. I see and directionally agre…

100% agreed.

> "Put a weight on that bacon!" ?

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#44
post #35
post #5

Tip: I very often use AI for inspiration. In this case, I ended up keeping a lot (not all) of the UI code it made, but I will very often prompt an agent, throw away everything it did, and redo it myself (manually!). I find the "zero to one" stage of creation very difficult and time consuming and AI is excellent at being my muse. This right here is the single biggest win for coding agents. I see and directionally agre…

This is an artefact of a language ecosystem that does not prioritize getting started. If you picked php/laravel with a few commands you are ahead of the days of work piping golang or node requires to get to a starting point.

I guess it depends on your business. I rarely start new professional projects, but I maintain them for 5+ years - a few pieces of production software I started are now in the double digits. Ghostty definitely aims to be in that camp of software.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the moment I can get a project up on its legs, to where I can interact with some substantial part of its functionality and refine it, I'm off to the races. [...] This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents. That's what's valuable to you . For me the zero to one part is the most rewarding and fun part, because that's when the possibilities are near endless, and you ge…

OP is considering output productivity, but your comment is about personal satisfaction of process

That's true, but when the work is rewarding, I also do it quite fast. When it's tedious tweaking, I have force myself to keep on typing.

Also: productivity is for machines, not for people.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#46
post #19

People are really bad at evaluating whether ai speeds them up or slows them down. The main question is, do you enjoy this kind of process of working with ai. I personally don't, so I don't use it. It's hard for me to believe any claims about productivity gains.

I like it when it works but I literally had to take a break yesterday due to the rage I was feeling from Claude repeatedly declaring "I found it!" or "Perfect - found the issue!" before totally breaking the code.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#48

Ghostty is awesome and I almost dropped iTerm for it until I hit cmd-f and nothing happened. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...

It’s planned for v1.3 in March 2026.

https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#49
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what people would discuss in all these ghostty posts if cmd-f had been present from the start. It’s getting a little boring hearing about it in every post! There’s interesting things to discuss here about LLM tooling and approaches to coding. But of course we’d rather complain about cmd-f ;)

People don’t care about advanced use cases when fundamentals are missing

Advanced use cases? Did you read the article? Making the update modal less intrusive isn’t an “advanced use case”, or even prime material for dicussion ;) The article is mainly about LLM-assisted coding, regardless of the terminal being used.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#50

I really respect Mitchell's response to the OpenAI accident, even if it is seen in positive light for ghostty. Can't think of any software vendor that actively tries to eliminate nag / annoyances (thinking specifically of MS Auto Update), so this is welcome. Also this article shows responsible use of AI when programming; I don't think it fits the original definition of vibe coding that caused hysterics.

> Also this article shows responsible use of AI when programming; I don't think it fits the original definition of vibe coding that caused hysterics.

Yep. It's vibe engineering, which simonw coined here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/

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