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Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

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Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#31

Post by akshaysg »

faramarz wrote: post #27

Very cool. I imagined my organizations entire codebase being mapped like this and across different frameworks and languages. I don’t know if I missed this in the video or if it’s not yet possible, but that’s a lot of manual work, so instead of connecting the nodes, give a simple bot to run in the repo folder to automate the visualization. It’s super cool and I’m adding to my watch list. If I were you, i’d target ente…

It automatically adds connections as you traverse through files/symbols. Not super sure if this is what you mean, but we intend to serve the users "flows" based on queries in the natural language e.g. "what happens when you click the subscribe button from the mouse down all the way to the backend".

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#32

Post by tracyhenry »

This has been a great idea for decades. I want Haystack to be successful just like many other attempts. The early execution seems promising. And I suspect there will be many challenges (e.g. when it's hard to figure out caller/callee,, inconsistent UX preferences across developers, etc). Kudos for taking this on!

Btw I've always thought that this is even more powerful when the screen estate is more infinite than a 2D screen (like in a VR headset).

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#34

Post by faramarz »

akshaysg wrote: post #31
faramarz wrote: post #27

Very cool. I imagined my organizations entire codebase being mapped like this and across different frameworks and languages. I don’t know if I missed this in the video or if it’s not yet possible, but that’s a lot of manual work, so instead of connecting the nodes, give a simple bot to run in the repo folder to automate the visualization. It’s super cool and I’m adding to my watch list. If I were you, i’d target ente…

It automatically adds connections as you traverse through files/symbols. Not super sure if this is what you mean, but we intend to serve the users "flows" based on queries in the natural language e.g. "what happens when you click the subscribe button from the mouse down all the way to the backend".

That’s awesome! Generally when I find tools that can improve our work culture and output velocity and quality, I try and get it on front of teams ahead of a an internal hackathon where the cost of on-boarding and prototyping is already factored in. This feels like a good candidate.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#36

Post by randomcatuser »

aappleby wrote: post #29
aappleby wrote: post #28

What happens when I have 10,000 or so editors open at once?

Proof of concept of mine from years ago - every file from the Linux kernel open in a browser window at once https://github.com/aappleby/wideboard

wow that's pretty next level

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#37

Post by akshaysg »

tracyhenry wrote: post #32

This has been a great idea for decades. I want Haystack to be successful just like many other attempts. The early execution seems promising. And I suspect there will be many challenges (e.g. when it's hard to figure out caller/callee,, inconsistent UX preferences across developers, etc). Kudos for taking this on! Btw I've always thought that this is even more powerful when the screen estate is more infinite than a 2D…

I love the idea of a Haystack VR world! It's a shame that VR software is in a tenuous state due to the biological factors, but I believe it's the future "one day".

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#38

Post by hyggetrold »

Does this project take any inspiration from Light Table?

Potential feature request - take the visualization beyond 2D. Really complex systems are usually an intricate graph (polite way of saying ball of yarn) and just visualizing in the 2D plane doesn't seem to cut it in my experience.

I would love to have something like concentric spheres of visualization - boundary services on the outer layer, core/domain services in the inner layer.

Re: Launch HN: Haystack (YC S24) – Visualize and edit code on an infinite canvas

#40

Post by necovek »

akshaysg wrote: post #25
valianter wrote: post #19

I get that this is a completely new idea so adoption is going to be slow but I'm curious to see how your user interviews and user research is going. I'm a young dev but I'm not even sure if I would use this because the way I've learned to code is already so ingrained into the traditional IDE. Nevertheless, congrats on the launch!

Yeah just to add onto what Jake said -- in our user interviews we found that folks, even those who are pretty used to old IDEs, do get the hang of Haystack pretty fast. However, developers are very idiosyncratic, so we frequently get pain points that are real problems but are also highly unique to each developer, which is interesting!

Totally: I couldn't stop thinking about actually generalizing this to a workspace/desktop so I could apply similar principles with multi-windowed Emacs — a window manager that also connects windows ;)

Looks really intriguing, but Emacs is really hard to leave behind.

But I do believe this pattern applies to more things than just IDEs, and might even replace multi-workspace setup. Keep at it and hopefully you are successful and this pattern keeps evolving!

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