Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature
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.
As an aside, the Ghostty recently made it mandatory to disclose the use of AI coding tools:
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...
OT but I can't imagine leaving my laptop open next to a pan of sizzling bacon
Haven’t used Ghostty but why is HN putting it on front page every other week? What’s the main attraction to it
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.
This post demonstrates one area where ai agents are a huge win: ui frameworks. I have a very similar workflow on an app I’m currently developing in Rust and GTK.
It’s not that I don’t know how to implement something, it’s that the agent can do so much of the tedious searching and trial and error that accompanies this ui framework code.
Notice that Mitchell maintains understanding of all the code through the session. It’s because he already understands what he needs to do. This is a far cry from the definition of “vibe coding” I think a lot of people are riding on. There’s no shortcut to becoming an expert.
Loving Ghostty!
> "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.
I'll often make these few hail mary attempts to fix a bug. If the agent can figure it out, I can study it and learn myself. If it doesn't, it costs me very little. If the agent figures it out and I don't understand it, I back it out. I'm not shipping code I don't understand. While it's failing, I'm also tabbed out searching the issue and trying to figure it out myself."
Awesome characterization ("slop zone"), pragmatic strategy (let it try; research in parallel) and essential principle ("I'm not shipping code I don't understand.")
IMHO this post is gold, for real-world project details and commentary from an expert doing their thing.
Today, for the first time ever, I had to kill a terminal with all the tabs because it became unresponsive.
Welp, that explains it. I haven't changed terminal in a while anyway...
I think as long as a human audit passes its good I also generated some pretty great code before, but I went in to review every single line to make sure
> 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
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 exactly what I hoped for when someone talks about their LLM Enabled coding experience.
- language - product - level of experience / seniority
> 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.
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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 agree with all the concerns people have about maintainability and sprawl in AI-mediated projects. I don't care, though, because 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. It's getting to that golden moment that constitutes 80% of what's costly about programming for me.
This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents. It seems so self-evidently valuable --- even if you do nothing else with an agent, even if you literally throw all the code away.
PS
Put a weight on that bacon!