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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

mitchellh.com

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Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#151

Post by vidarh »

tptacek wrote: post #100
stavros wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, definitely. I do agree with the skeptics to a point, as I don't let the LLM write code without reviewing (it makes many mistakes that compound), but I'd still rather have it write a function, review and steer, have it write another, and so on, than write database models myself for the millionth time. It's not that I find it hard, I've just done it so many times that it's boring. Maybe I should be solving differ…

I was just talking about this in a chat today, because 'simonw had at some point talked about getting to the point where he was letting go of reviewing every line of LLM code, and I am nowhere close to that point --- I'll take Claude's word on Tailwind classes as long as the HTML looks right, but actual code, I review line-by-line, token-by-token, and usually rewrite things, even if just for cosmetic reasons.

I've had Claude write ~50+ commits of compiler code over the last week, and I've mostly not even read it yet. I will review the end result at some point, and I do spot checks, but for the most part I review whether or not the number of specs that passes is going the right way, and occasionally butt in when I glance over and spot it doing something silly.

I fully get why people won't trust it, but I'm leaning more and more on reigning it in with specs and tests and process, and then letting it run for extended amounts of time, and then giving it instructions to fix obvious issues, before finally reviewing the result, and letting it fix whatever comes up.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#152

Post by didibus »

> I have a toddler at home so my "computer time" is very scheduled and very limited

I'm slowly wondering if coding AI agents are turning into the best case scenario for workers. Maybe I'm being hopeful haha.

But having something that doesn't make you faster but just lets you be less concentrated and focused and mentally lazier while producing the same amount of work in the same time as a super dedicated and focused session would have. That's best case scenario here.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#153

Post by _aavaa_ »

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?

No we shouldn’t rely on app stores. That would mean giving up a lot of control and putting your app at the whim of the store.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#154

Post by SalariedSlave »

zem wrote: post #126

> 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 sy…

there are operating systems where this is not hard at all.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#155

Post by alberth »

nextworddev wrote: post #28

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

This isn’t a “ghostty” post.

This is a post by a hugely respected developer (due to his past & current accomplishments), writing about his experiences in how to best leverage an AI coding assistant.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#156

Post by zem »

SalariedSlave wrote: post #154
zem wrote: post #126

> 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 sy…

there are operating systems where this is not hard at all.

which ones, and what is the mechanism to do it? from what I've seen of both linux and windows there is no good central way to toggle this efficiently, and evidently macs also leave it up to various applications to be well behaved.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#158

Post by valcker »

qudat wrote: post #105
piazz wrote: post #52

Such a useful walkthrough. It looks like Mitchell is using an agentic framework called Amp (I’d never heard of it) - does anybody else here use it or tried it? Curious how it stacks up against Claude Code.

I’m using it. It’s expensive but it’s awesome

How is it compared to Claude Code?

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#159

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

The white page problem hits me every time.

It's not FUN building all the scaffolding and setting up build scripts and all the main functions and directory structures.

Nor do I want to use some kind of initialiser or skeleton project, they always overdo things in my opinion, adding too much and too little at the same time.

With AI I can have it whip up an MVP-level happy-paths-only skeleton project in minutes and then I can start iterating with the fun bits of the project.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#160

Post by Rapzid »

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…

Even then AI autocomplete is way better today than at the start of the year; never mind 2 years ago.

Not only are the suggestions better, but they are presented much less obtrusively now in IDEs. For example it no longer ambushes you with a 500 line suggestion while you are typing, it shows a bit of what it wants to add next and seems to pull away if you are laying down code while ignoring it.

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