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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

mitchellh.com

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Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#121

Post by mitchellh »

jebarker wrote: post #102
mitchellh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah understood, I'm not taking it negatively, I just genuinely wanted to understand where it came from. Yeah this is from 2021 (!!!) and is directly related to LSPs. ChatGPT didn't even get launched until Nov 2022. So I think the quote doesn't really work in the context of today, it's literally from an era where I was looking at faster horses when cars were right around the corner and I had not a damn clue. Hah. Off…

Are you still using the NixOS setup you showed in that interview or do you now use the MacOS native ghostty?

I do. I use both!

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#123

Post by simonw »

qudat wrote: post #106
simonw wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't yet spent any time with it myself, but the impression I have been getting is that it is the most credible of the vendor-independent terminal coding agents right now. Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI are all (loosely) locked to their own models.

As far as I know it only uses sonnet 4.5

It's currently Sonnet 4.5 by default but uses GPT-5 for the "oracle" second opinion, according to https://ampcode.com/manual#oracle

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#124

Post by signatoremo »

harrall wrote: post #64
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…

People get into this field for very different reasons. - People who like the act and craftsmanship of coding itself. AI can encourage slop from other engineers and it trivializes the work. AI is a negative. - People who like general engineering. AI is positive for reducing the amount of (mundane) code to write, but still requires significant high-level architectural guidance. It’s a tool. - People who like product. A…

> - People who like the act and craftsmanship of coding itself. AI can encourage slop from other engineers and it trivializes the work. AI is a negative.

Those who value craftsmanships would value LLM, since they can pick up new languages or frameworks much faster. They can then master the newly acquired skills on their own if preferred, or they can use LLM to help along the way.

> People who like product. AI can be useful for prototyping but won’t won’t be able to make a good product on its own. It’s a tool.

Any serious product often comprises of multiple modules, layers, interfaces. LLM can help greatly with building some of those building blocks. Definitely a useful tool for product building.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#125

Post by rolisz »

roughly wrote: post #73
tptacek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real subtle. Why not just write "there are good programmers and bad programmers and AI is good for bad programmers and only bad programmers"? Think about what you just said about Mitchell Hashimoto here.

I'm not sure that's a fair take. I don't think it's an unfair statement that LLM-generated code typically is not very good - you can work with it and set up enough guard rails and guidance and whatnot that it can start to produce decent code, but out of the box, speed is definitely the selling point. They're basically junior interns. If you consider an engineer's job to be writing code, sure, you could read OP's post…

First, I agree with tptacek that Ghostty is a work of craftsmanship. Mitchell is a very talented dev and he says he greatly benefits from using AI.

On the other hand I understand your point that some people got into coding because of coding and they like doing that manually. Unfortunately, we're not being paid to do what we like, but to solve problems with code. What we like is usually a hobby. Software engineering had a golden run for 20-30 years where we were paid well to do things we enjoyed doing, but unfortunately that might change. As an analogy, think about woodworking: there's craftsmanship in a nice wood table, but at the end of day I won't pay thousands of dollars for one, when a couple of hundred dollars will buy me a good enough one from IKEA (maybe you're not like that, but the general population is).

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#126

Post by zem »

> Let's set the stage for what lead to this feature (pun intended, as you'll see shortly). During a high-profile OpenAI keynote, a demo was rudely interrupted by a Ghostty update prompt

quite apart from the article itself, I'm reminded of how much we put up with from our operating systems. presentations and screen sharing have been a fact of life for a couple of decades now; why is it so hard to tell the operating system to strictly not allow anything other than that one window access to the screen?

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#127

Post by gertop »

signatoremo wrote: post #124
harrall wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get into this field for very different reasons. - People who like the act and craftsmanship of coding itself. AI can encourage slop from other engineers and it trivializes the work. AI is a negative. - People who like general engineering. AI is positive for reducing the amount of (mundane) code to write, but still requires significant high-level architectural guidance. It’s a tool. - People who like product. A…

> - People who like the act and craftsmanship of coding itself. AI can encourage slop from other engineers and it trivializes the work. AI is a negative. Those who value craftsmanships would value LLM, since they can pick up new languages or frameworks much faster. They can then master the newly acquired skills on their own if preferred, or they can use LLM to help along the way. > People who like product. AI can be…

> Those who value craftsmanships would value LLM, since they can pick up new languages or frameworks much faster. They can then master the newly acquired skills on their own if preferred, or they can use LLM to help along the way.

That's like saying those who value books would value movie adaptations because they can pick up new stories much faster.

Is it really so alien to you the someone might prefer learning a new language or framework by, gasp, reading its documentation?

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#129

Post by ozgrakkurt »

Too wrote: post #128

Tangential question. Why does every app still need its own auto-update framework? Shouldn’t we all rely on app-stores and package managers for this?

It is nice to have it on ubuntu for example. So you can install latest version by downloading it manually and keep getting updates after.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#130

Post by matwood »

mitchellh wrote: post #76
jebarker wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I'm guessing it may be this interview I did 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/rysgxl35EGc?t=214 (timestamp linked to LLM-relevant section) I'm genuinely curious because I don't quite remember saying the quote you're saying I did. I'm not denying it, but I'd love to know more of the context. :) But, if it is the interview from 2 years ago, it revolved more around autocomplete…

> As the popular quote goes, "When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?" > The facts and circumstances have changed considerably in recent years, and I have too!

This should be everyone's default if we are learning. Not saying that's what the OP did here, but I hate how people dig out something that was said years ago like it's some gotcha. I think it's a bigger issue if people never change their minds about anything because it would show hubris and a lack of learning.

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