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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

mitchellh.com

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Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#91

Post by Fraterkes »

mitchellh wrote: post #83
jebarker wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was this one: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/dev-tool-time-mitchell-hashimot... They even used the quote as the title of the accompanying blog post. As I say, I didn’t mean this as a gotcha or anything- I totally agree with the change and I have done similarly. I’ve always disabled autocomplete, tool tips, suggestions etc but now I am actively using Cursor daily.

Yeah understood, I'm not taking it negatively, I just genuinely wanted to understand where it came from. Yeah this is from 2021 (!!!) and is directly related to LSPs. ChatGPT didn't even get launched until Nov 2022. So I think the quote doesn't really work in the context of today, it's literally from an era where I was looking at faster horses when cars were right around the corner and I had not a damn clue. Hah. Off…

What do you not like about LSPs? When you do eg refactoring isn't it nice to do operations on something that actually reflects the structure of your code?

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#93

Post by mitchellh »

Fraterkes wrote: post #91
mitchellh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah understood, I'm not taking it negatively, I just genuinely wanted to understand where it came from. Yeah this is from 2021 (!!!) and is directly related to LSPs. ChatGPT didn't even get launched until Nov 2022. So I think the quote doesn't really work in the context of today, it's literally from an era where I was looking at faster horses when cars were right around the corner and I had not a damn clue. Hah. Off…

What do you not like about LSPs? When you do eg refactoring isn't it nice to do operations on something that actually reflects the structure of your code?

I use agents for that, and it does a shockingly good job. LSPs constantly take up resources, most are poorly written, and I have to worry about version compatibility, editor compatibility, etc. It's just a very annoying ecosystem to me.

External agent where I can say "rename this field from X to Y" or "rewrite this into a dedicated class and update all callers" and so on works way better. Obviously, you have to be careful reviewing it since its not working at the same level of guarantee an LSP is but its worth it.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#94

Post by underdeserver »

mitchellh wrote: post #93
Fraterkes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you not like about LSPs? When you do eg refactoring isn't it nice to do operations on something that actually reflects the structure of your code?

I use agents for that, and it does a shockingly good job. LSPs constantly take up resources, most are poorly written, and I have to worry about version compatibility, editor compatibility, etc. It's just a very annoying ecosystem to me. External agent where I can say "rename this field from X to Y" or "rewrite this into a dedicated class and update all callers" and so on works way better. Obviously, you have to be ca…

Hmm, most LSPs don't give you a very strong guarantee either (when you e.g. rename a variable).

I suppose in some languages it's undecidable in the worst case, but it should work in reasonably hygienic codebases.

Also, they tend to freeze or crash for no reason.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#95

Post by [deleted] »

underdeserver wrote: post #94
mitchellh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use agents for that, and it does a shockingly good job. LSPs constantly take up resources, most are poorly written, and I have to worry about version compatibility, editor compatibility, etc. It's just a very annoying ecosystem to me. External agent where I can say "rename this field from X to Y" or "rewrite this into a dedicated class and update all callers" and so on works way better. Obviously, you have to be ca…

Hmm, most LSPs don't give you a very strong guarantee either (when you e.g. rename a variable). I suppose in some languages it's undecidable in the worst case, but it should work in reasonably hygienic codebases. Also, they tend to freeze or crash for no reason.

[deleted]

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#96

Post by piazz »

simonw wrote: post #63
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.

This is good to know. I’ll probably play around with it sometime in the future.

BTW, appreciate your many great write-ups - they’ve been invaluable for keeping up to date in this space.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#97

Post by stavros »

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'm the opposite, I find getting started easy and rewarding, I don't generally get blocked there. Where I get blocked, after almost thirty years of development, is writing the code.

I really like building things, but they're all basically putting the same code together in slightly different ways, so the part I find rewarding isn't the coding, it's the seeing everything come together in the end. That's why I really like LLMs, they let me do all the fun parts without any of the boring parts I've done a thousand times before.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#98

Post by tptacek »

stavros wrote: post #97
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'm the opposite, I find getting started easy and rewarding, I don't generally get blocked there. Where I get blocked, after almost thirty years of development, is writing the code. I really like building things, but they're all basically putting the same code together in slightly different ways, so the part I find rewarding isn't the coding, it's the seeing everything come together in the end. That's why I really li…

It's funny because the part you find challenging is exactly the thing LLM skeptics tend to say accounts for almost none of the work (writing the code). I personally find that once my project is up on its legs and I'm in flow state, writing code is easy and pleasant, but one thing clear from this thread is everyone experiences programming a little differently.

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#99

Post by stavros »

tptacek wrote: post #98
stavros wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the opposite, I find getting started easy and rewarding, I don't generally get blocked there. Where I get blocked, after almost thirty years of development, is writing the code. I really like building things, but they're all basically putting the same code together in slightly different ways, so the part I find rewarding isn't the coding, it's the seeing everything come together in the end. That's why I really li…

It's funny because the part you find challenging is exactly the thing LLM skeptics tend to say accounts for almost none of the work (writing the code). I personally find that once my project is up on its legs and I'm in flow state, writing code is easy and pleasant, but one thing clear from this thread is everyone experiences programming a little differently.

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 different/harder problems, but I don't mind having the LLM write the code, and I'm doing what I like and I'm more productive than ever, so eh!

Re: Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

#100

Post by tptacek »

stavros wrote: post #99
tptacek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because the part you find challenging is exactly the thing LLM skeptics tend to say accounts for almost none of the work (writing the code). I personally find that once my project is up on its legs and I'm in flow state, writing code is easy and pleasant, but one thing clear from this thread is everyone experiences programming a little differently.

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.
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