Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 128 posts

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#71

Post by julesrms »

As this post gradually sinks downwards on the HN front page, I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who've made all the lovely comments, it's great to get some feedback to show I haven't been wasting my time building this!

And as I said, this whole project was 100% done by me in my spare time, with zero money behind it, and no real plan for what happens to it now!

If you like it, please spread the word, as I don't have a marketing budget! If it manages to get a big enough userbase then hopefully I'll be able to figure out some way to make it a full-time gig, as it's been really fascinating to build!

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#72

Post by kosolam »

paldepind2 wrote: post #65
julesrms wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An agent like claude might run a subagent (e.g. to fetch and summarise a web page, or explore a code question) as if it's a tool, so you can't really see what's going on inside it. Juggler makes these sub-threads part of the overall structure, so you can navigate into them. Another really elegant thing that pops out of subthreads is that to do a compaction, you simply move the entire conversation into a subthread, an…

Ah, ok. Visibility into subagents makes perfect sense. From the "reddit-style" description I was imagining something where the user was conversing non-linearly with the agent at different points in some big tree.

Lol

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#73

Post by julesrms »

sbloz wrote: post #70
julesrms wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've mainly used the tree stuff when tackling a large plan - tell the LLM to do things using sub-threads, so the parent gets the summaries and orchestrates them. But TBH for most smaller tasks I tend to create a conversation, do a linear task, and bin it. Because a plugin can also use the sub-thread system, maybe people will come up with some interesting uses for them that I haven't thought of, my own use tends to be…

I see. That seems pretty similar to plan mode + "implement with subagents". The display for that in terminal apps is pretty bad, but it's low friction. One more question around yDoc and remote access if you don't mind. Do you have thoughts on a tool like this for "LLM pair programming" or just general collaboration? Working with teams on smaller projects with these tools is really hard because anyone can build anythi…

TBH I've found myself using juggler's tabs like a kanban board.

It'll certainly let multiple people share the same live session, so that tab list would act pretty much like a live shared kanban board. If you're all happy working on the same folder at the same time, then that would work! I guess that just by adding something like per-tab worktrees it could actually be a pretty good team server.. hmm.. Hadn't really looked at it like that yet, but that' interesting

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#74

Post by sbloz »

julesrms wrote: post #73
sbloz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. That seems pretty similar to plan mode + "implement with subagents". The display for that in terminal apps is pretty bad, but it's low friction. One more question around yDoc and remote access if you don't mind. Do you have thoughts on a tool like this for "LLM pair programming" or just general collaboration? Working with teams on smaller projects with these tools is really hard because anyone can build anythi…

TBH I've found myself using juggler's tabs like a kanban board. It'll certainly let multiple people share the same live session, so that tab list would act pretty much like a live shared kanban board. If you're all happy working on the same folder at the same time, then that would work! I guess that just by adding something like per-tab worktrees it could actually be a pretty good team server.. hmm.. Hadn't really lo…

The first orchestrator I built was a kanban board that spawned a vscode session per task with a plan file in it. Nice contained way to do a chat session, you can review the files and make edits, and close it once it's done. Very slow and heavy though. So that way of working resonates with me.

For some more unsolicited feedback: if that's how you use it why not pitch it that way/ make that way of working more obvious? Bug tracking and todo's jump to mind for me. For example: I want to write a prompt to fix this bug at some point but I need to think more about it. Right now I just need a place to jot it down for now so I don't forget.

Re: collab - managing edits and other state (builds/lints/test processes) is definitely a tricky problem. "Frictionless" worktrees is an interesting idea. That often seems like the "right" solution for how I'm working but it's too annoying to do for smaller changes. Doing that well would be a reason for me to give this a try.

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#75

Post by hyperhello »

julesrms wrote: post #71

As this post gradually sinks downwards on the HN front page, I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who've made all the lovely comments, it's great to get some feedback to show I haven't been wasting my time building this! And as I said, this whole project was 100% done by me in my spare time, with zero money behind it, and no real plan for what happens to it now! If you like it, please spread the word, as I don't h…

You seem pretty cool and in it for the fun. May I make one feature request that would cause me to try it? A big reassuring READ ONLY mode that sandboxes file writes to zero. Of course that would constrain some of the product from working, that’s okay.

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#76

Post by easymuffin »

markasoftware wrote: post #56

Really glad to see an harness other than Pi that seems to be non-vc-backed FOSS and by a competent maintainer Edit: seems like the remote connection feature may not work...

Pi (Earendil) is afaik vc-backed. Accel, Balderton, etc see last section of https://earendil.com/posts/announcing-pi-and-lefos/

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#77

Post by julesrms »

hyperhello wrote: post #75
julesrms wrote: post #71

As this post gradually sinks downwards on the HN front page, I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who've made all the lovely comments, it's great to get some feedback to show I haven't been wasting my time building this! And as I said, this whole project was 100% done by me in my spare time, with zero money behind it, and no real plan for what happens to it now! If you like it, please spread the word, as I don't h…

You seem pretty cool and in it for the fun. May I make one feature request that would cause me to try it? A big reassuring READ ONLY mode that sandboxes file writes to zero. Of course that would constrain some of the product from working, that’s okay.

The default mode it uses for approving LLM tools is already read-only - it has a quite complicated (but conservative) bash parser that tries to let things that are definitely read-only get approved without bothering the user. It also has a tool for exploring the codebase where the LLM provides javascript code that runs in a sandbox with a read-only filesystem class.

But the architecture is such that this core functionality is just a plugin, and anyone can write their own custom approval filter plugin, and make it do whatever you want

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#78

Post by julesrms »

sbloz wrote: post #74
julesrms wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH I've found myself using juggler's tabs like a kanban board. It'll certainly let multiple people share the same live session, so that tab list would act pretty much like a live shared kanban board. If you're all happy working on the same folder at the same time, then that would work! I guess that just by adding something like per-tab worktrees it could actually be a pretty good team server.. hmm.. Hadn't really lo…

The first orchestrator I built was a kanban board that spawned a vscode session per task with a plan file in it. Nice contained way to do a chat session, you can review the files and make edits, and close it once it's done. Very slow and heavy though. So that way of working resonates with me. For some more unsolicited feedback: if that's how you use it why not pitch it that way/ make that way of working more obvious?…

Yes, definitely considering that kind of angle to it. It's all evolving, I've only really been properly dogfooding in it for a couple of months, so still working out best practices.

And the collab side of things I'm only just now really having space to start pondering.

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#79

Post by jabenhaim »

The "session is a document, not a log file" framing is the part I'd underline. Being able to inspect and edit the raw context JSON going to the model is criminally rare, most tools treat the context as a black box, and on long runs context bloat is the single biggest cause of the model quietly drifting. Making it inspectable and prunable is a real lever, not a gimmick.

The thing I'm curious about: once you branch, backtrack, or edit a node in the CRDT tree, how do you reconcile that with the model's linear context on the next turn? If you reconstruct the transcript from the tree each turn, does editing anything upstream blow away provider prompt caching, since the Anthropic/OpenAI caches key off an exact prefix match? That's the tension I keep hitting: tree-shaped editing is exactly what you want for control, but it fights the flat-prefix caching that keeps long sessions cheap and fast. Curious whether you just eat the re-cache cost or do something cleverer.

Either way, Miller columns over a doom-scroll is the right instinct. Nice work.

Re: Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE

#80

Post by markasoftware »

easymuffin wrote: post #76
markasoftware wrote: post #56

Really glad to see an harness other than Pi that seems to be non-vc-backed FOSS and by a competent maintainer Edit: seems like the remote connection feature may not work...

Pi (Earendil) is afaik vc-backed. Accel, Balderton, etc see last section of https://earendil.com/posts/announcing-pi-and-lefos/

gdi, we need a GNU project for the llm era
Post reply on HN