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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

mitchellh.com

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Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#51

Post by chrisweekly »

> "You can see in chats 11 to 14 that we're entering the slop zone. The code the agent created has a critical bug, and it's absolutely failing to fix it. And I have no idea how to fix it, either.

I'll often make these few hail mary attempts to fix a bug. If the agent can figure it out, I can study it and learn myself. If it doesn't, it costs me very little. If the agent figures it out and I don't understand it, I back it out. I'm not shipping code I don't understand. While it's failing, I'm also tabbed out searching the issue and trying to figure it out myself."

Awesome characterization ("slop zone"), pragmatic strategy (let it try; research in parallel) and essential principle ("I'm not shipping code I don't understand.")

IMHO this post is gold, for real-world project details and commentary from an expert doing their thing.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#54

Post by do_not_redeem »

sevg wrote: post #11
Shadowmist wrote: post #3

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...

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 ;)

Since we're here, I'm just waiting for them to implement drag-and-drop on KDE. Right now it only works on GNOME, and although Ghostty is great I'm not going to switch to GNOME just for a terminal emulator.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#56

Post by srcreigh »

ttiurani wrote: post #30
tptacek wrote: 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…

> 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…

Surely there are some things which you can’t be arsed to take from zero to one?

This isn’t selling your soul; it is possible to let AI scaffold some tedious garbage while also dreaming up cool stuff the old fashioned way.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#57

Post by simonw »

ttiurani wrote: post #45
wahnfrieden wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tedious tweaking is my favorite thing to outsource to coding agents these days.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#58

Post by ttiurani »

srcreigh wrote: post #56
ttiurani wrote: post #30

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…

Surely there are some things which you can’t be arsed to take from zero to one? This isn’t selling your soul; it is possible to let AI scaffold some tedious garbage while also dreaming up cool stuff the old fashioned way.

> Surely there are some things which you can’t be arsed to take from zero to one?

No, not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45232159

> This isn’t selling your soul;

There is a plethora of ethical reasons to reject AI even if it was useful.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#59

Post by simonw »

chrisweekly wrote: post #43
tptacek wrote: 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!" ?

Mitchell included a photograph of his breakfast preparation, and the bacon was curling up on the frying pan.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#60

Post by pastel8739 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #38
austinjp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In climate terms, or even simply in terms of $cost, this very much feels like throwing failing on a bonfire. Should we really advocate for using AI to both create and then destroy huge amounts of data that will never be used?

The environmental cost of AI is mostly in training afaik. The inference energy cost is similar to the google searches and reddit etc loads you might do during handwritten dev last I checked. This might be completely wrong though

I hear this argument a lot, but it doesn’t hold water for me. Obviously the use of the AI is the thing that makes it worthwhile to do the training, so you obviously need to amortize the training cost over the inference. I don’t know whether or not doing so makes the environmental cost substantially higher, though.
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