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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

mitchellh.com

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Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#31

Post by CurleighBraces »

dlvhdr wrote: 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.

This is the crux of the discussion. For me the output is a greater reward than the input. The faster I can reach the output the better.

And to clarify, I don't mean output as "this feature works, awesome", but "this feature works, it's maintainable and the code looks as beautiful as I can make it"

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#32

Post by chrsig »

> 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.

This definitely relaxes my ai-hype anxiety

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#33

Post by austinjp »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #26
j45 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's possible to use AI to help review the PRs and claim it's the AI making the PR's hyperproductive?

Yes, this. If you can describe why it is slop, an AI can probably identify the underlying issues automatically. Done right you should get mostly reasonable code out of the "execution focused peer".

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?

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#34

Post by dismalaf »

> 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 is pretty much how I use AI. I don't have it in my editor, I always use it in a browser window, but I bounce ideas off it, use it like a better search engine and even if I don't use the exact code it produces I do feel there's some value.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#35

Post by ipaddr »

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…

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.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#36

Post by Xss3 »

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…

My trouble is that the remaining 20% of work takes 80% of my time. Ai assistance or not. The edge

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#37

Post by wahnfrieden »

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…

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

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#38

Post by wahnfrieden »

austinjp wrote: post #33
XenophileJKO wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this. If you can describe why it is slop, an AI can probably identify the underlying issues automatically. Done right you should get mostly reasonable code out of the "execution focused peer".

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

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#39

Post by wahnfrieden »

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 ;)

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

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#40

Post by wahnfrieden »

dlvhdr wrote: post #23
commandersaki wrote: post #15

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.

yeah the usage of "vibe coding" here doesn't fit at all. That term is so overused.

It has simply evolved from its initial meaning, as language does.
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