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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

mitchellh.com

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Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#61

Post by vunderba »

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

AI is an absolute boon for "getting off the ground" by offloading a lot of the boilerplate and scaffolding that one tends to lose enthusiasm for after having to do it for the 99th time.

> AI is excellent at being my muse.

I'm guessing we have a different definition for muse. Though I admit I'm speaking more about writing (than coding) here but for myself, a muse is the veritable fount of creation - the source of ideas.

Feel free to crank the "temperature" on your LLM until the literal and figurative oceans boil off into space, at the end of the day you're still getting the ultimate statistical distillation.

https://imgur.com/a/absqqXI

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#62

Post by simonw »

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.

Worth noting that Mitchell didn't actually use the term "vibe coding" anywhere in this article.

He called it "vibing" in the headline, which matches my suspicion that the term "vibe" is evolving to mean anything that uses generative AI, see also Microsoft "vibe working": https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/09/2...

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#63

Post by simonw »

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 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.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#64

Post by harrall »

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. 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.

- People who just want to build a MVP. AI is honestly amazing at making something that at least works. It might be bad code but you are testing product fit. Koolaid mode.

That’s why everyone has a totally different viewpoint.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#65

Post by shinycode »

Xss3 wrote: post #36
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

100% agree and LLM does have many blind spots and high confidence which makes it hard to really trust without checking

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#67

Post by tptacek »

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…

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.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#68

Post by SatvikBeri »

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…

Agree – my personal rule is that I throw away any branches where I use LLM-generated code, and I still find it very helpful because of the speed of prototyping various ideas.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#69

Post by tptacek »

simonw wrote: post #59
chrisweekly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are great and everybody should own a bunch of them.

https://www.thechefspress.com/

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#70

Post by roughly »

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…

I was talking about this the other day with someone - broadly I agree with this, they're absolutely fantastic for getting a prototype so you can play with the interactions and just have something to poke at while testing an idea. There's two problems I've found with that, though - the first is that it's already a nightmare to convince management that something that looks and acts like the thing they want isn't actually ready for production, and the vibe coded code is even less ready for production than my previous prototyping efforts.

The second is that a hand-done prototype still teaches you something about the tech stack and the implementation - yes, the primary purpose is to get it running quickly so you can feel how it works, but there's usually some learning you get on the technical side, and often I've found my prototypes inform the underlying technical direction. With vibe coded prototypes, you don't get this - not only is the code basically unusable, but you really are back to starting from scratch if you decide to move forward - you've tested the idea, but you haven't really tested the tech or design.

I still think they're useful - I'm a big proponent of "prototype early," and we've been able to throw together some surprisingly large systems almost instantly with the LLMs - but I think you've gotta shift your understanding of the process. Non-LLM prototypes tend to be around step 4 or 5 of a hypothetical 10-step production process, LLM prototypes are closer to step 2. That's fine, but you need to set expectations around how much is left to do past the prototype, because it's more than it was before.

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