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Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature
- nextworddev 11mo agoHaven’t used Ghostty but why is HN putting it on front page every other week? What’s the main attraction to it
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoProduct merits aside… Its developer is a celebrity figure and people here are captivated by the story of a billionaire who writes open source without a business model, like we regular folks do when we don’t have a hustle to focus on
- alberth 11mo agoThis isn’t a “ghostty” post. This is a post by a hugely respected developer (due to his past & current accomplishments), writing about his experiences in how to best leverage an AI coding assistant.
- ColinEberhardt 11mo agoAs an aside, the Ghostty recently made it mandatory to disclose the use of AI coding tools: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/8289 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/8289
- Shadowmist 11mo agoGhostty 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%20state%3Aopen%20sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
- uzername 11mo agoMissing search and weird ssh control character issues are my blockers. It's great otherwise!
- PyWoody 11mo agoReposting my comment from [0]: Have you tried the suggestions in https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#ssh? I don't know what issue you may be experiencing but this solved my issue with using htop in an ssh session. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359239
- senderista 11mo agoThis is the blocker for me as well.
- sevg 11mo agoI 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 ;)
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoPeople don’t care about advanced use cases when fundamentals are missing
- sevg 11mo agoAdvanced use cases? Did you read the article? Making the update modal less intrusive isn’t an “advanced use case”, or even prime material for dicussion ;) The article is mainly about LLM-assisted coding, regardless of the terminal being used.
- do_not_redeem 11mo agoSince we're here, I'm just waiting for them to implement drag-and-drop on KDE. Right now it only works on GNOME, and although Ghostty is great I'm not going to switch to GNOME just for a terminal emulator.
- mikkupikku 11mo ago[dead]
- ghosty141 11mo agoMissing scrollbars. That and ctrl f are my two annoyances, apart from that I love ghostty and use it daily at work.
- jumploops 11mo agoYeah I quickly (and unfortunately!) switched back to Warp, as Ghostty was a little too barebones for my use case. Word to the wise: Ghostty’s default scrollback buffer is only ~10MB, but it can easily be changed with a config option.
- JimDabell 11mo agoIt’s planned for v1.3 in March 2026. https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap
- nevon 11mo agoFunnily enough, I spent the last weekend implementing search in Ghostty using Claude. There's already a kinda working implementation of the actual searching, so most of the job was just wiring it up to the UI. After two sessions of maybe 10 hours in total, I had basic searching with highlighting and go to next/previous match working in the Linux frontend. The search implementation is explicitly a work in progress though, so not something that's ready for general use. That said, it certainly made me appreciate the complexity of such a "basic" feature when I started thinking about how to make this work when tailing a stream of text.
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- senderista 11mo agoOT but I can't imagine leaving my laptop open next to a pan of sizzling bacon
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- tptacek 11mo agoTip: 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!
- ramon156 11mo agoIt's invaluable if you don't know how to work with it
- sjdjsin 11mo ago> This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents Because I have a coworker who is pushing slop at unsustainable levels, and proclaiming to management how much more productive he is. It’s now even more of a risk to my career to speak up about how awful his PRs are to review (and I’m not the only one on the team who wishes to speak up). The internet is rife with people who claim to be living in the future where they are now a 10x dev. Making these claims costs almost nothing, but it is negatively effecting mine and many others day to day. I’m not necessarily blaming these internet voices (I don’t blame a bear for killing a hiker), but the damage they’re doing is still real.
- tptacek 11mo agoI don't think you read the sentence you're responding to carefully enough. The antecedent of "this" isn't "coding agents" generally: it's "the value of an agent getting you past the blank page stage to a point where the substantive core of your feature functions well enough to start iterating on". If you want to respond to the argument I made there, you have to respond to the actual argument, not a broader one that's easier (and much less interesting) to take swipes at.
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- commandersaki 11mo agoI 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.
- dlvhdr 11mo agoyeah the usage of "vibe coding" here doesn't fit at all. That term is so overused.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoIt has simply evolved from its initial meaning, as language does.
- simonw 11mo agoWorth 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/2025/09/29/vibe-working-introducing-agent-mode-and-office-agent-in-microsoft-365-copilot/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/09/2...
- mitchellh 11mo agoI'll add the title is a bit of bait. I don't use the word "vibe" (in any of its forms) anywhere outside of the title. I'm not baiting for general engagement, I don't really care about that. I'm baiting for people who are extremist on either side of the "vibe" spectrum such that it'd trigger them to read this, because either way I think it could be good for them. If you're an extreme pro-vibe person, I wanted to give an example of what I feel is a positive usage of AI. There's a lot of extreme vibe hype boys who are... sloppy. And if you're an extreme anti-vibe person, I wanted to give an example that clearly refutes many criticisms. (Not all, of course, e.g. there's no discussion here one way or another about say... resource usage). So, sorry!
- dlvhdr 11mo agoPeople 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.
- CurleighBraces 11mo agoThis 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"
- jebarker 11mo agoI like it when it works but I literally had to take a break yesterday due to the rage I was feeling from Claude repeatedly declaring "I found it!" or "Perfect - found the issue!" before totally breaking the code.
- WD-42 11mo agoThis 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!
- Razengan 11mo ago[flagged]
- hoppp 11mo agoI 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
- chrsig 11mo ago> 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
- dismalaf 11mo ago> 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.
- intended 11mo agoThis is exactly what I hoped for when someone talks about their LLM Enabled coding experience. - language - product - level of experience / seniority
- chrisweekly 11mo ago> "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.
- piazz 11mo agoSuch 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.
- simonw 11mo agoI 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.
- piazz 11mo agoThis 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.
- qudat 11mo agoAs far as I know it only uses sonnet 4.5
- simonw 11mo agoIt's currently Sonnet 4.5 by default but uses GPT-5 for the "oracle" second opinion, according to https://ampcode.com/manual#oracle https://ampcode.com/manual#oracle
- qudat 11mo agoI’m using it. It’s expensive but it’s awesome
- valcker 11mo agoHow is it compared to Claude Code?
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- xlii 11mo agoToday, 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...
- osigurdson 11mo ago>> AI is very good at fill-in-the-blank or draw-the-rest-of-the-owl. This is definitely the sweet spot imo. Any time I've been able to come up with a solid, hand coded pattern and have AI repeat in several similar areas has been the most rewarding experiences that I have had with it.
- thaumasiotes 11mo agoBy the time you've done that, why not repeat it yourself? I once needed to define a large table of trigrams in C (for the purpose of distinguishing "English" from "not English"). Setting it up looked like this: 1. Download a book from Project Gutenberg. 2. Write something that went through the book character-by-character, and for every character, remembered the trigram ending there. 3. Make the form of "remembering" be "append a line of code to this file that says `array[char1][char2][char3] = 1`". 4. Now I have a really long C file that compiles into the dictionary I want. It sounds to me kind of like you want to replace step 3 with an LLM. If that's right... what value is the LLM adding?
- osigurdson 11mo agoConcretely, I was creating a cli application. I had implemented a few commands end-to-end and established some solid patterns. I used Codex (i.e. the PR creating flavor) to provide instructions and get it to review the existing patterns before continuing as asked it to rigorously follow them. I had to do about ~10 more things and it worked really well. It was easy for me to review and understand because I already knew the pattern and it seemed easy for it to get right. It worked so well that I am always trying to look for opportunities like this but honestly, it isn't that common. Many times you aren't creating a pattern and repeating - you are creating a new pattern. AI is good to chat with to get ideas and come up with an approach in these situations seems to be more effective to me.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> It was easy for me to review and understand because I already knew the pattern and it seemed easy for it to get right. I suggest that you already knowing the pattern actually makes it harder for you to review code that you expect to contain the pattern. You're likely to perceive it as being there whether it is or not. This strikes me as a way of using LLMs that is more dangerous than average. Relatedly, proofreading your own work is much more error-prone than proofreading someone else's work, precisely because you have a mental model of your own work (created when you produced it) and you're likely to consult the mental model rather than the work.
- abstractspoon 11mo agoAnd the very bit that you admit not being good at - the zero to one stage - will remain forever out of reach because you get the AI to do the heavy lifting. You have to practise that bit yourself, unless of course you never want to be able to do it yourself...
- scuff3d 11mo ago> I'm not shipping code I don't understand. So not vibe coded, but AI assisted.
- zem 11mo ago> Let's set the stage for what lead to this feature (pun intended, as you'll see shortly). During a high-profile OpenAI keynote, a demo was rudely interrupted by a Ghostty update prompt quite apart from the article itself, I'm reminded of how much we put up with from our operating systems. presentations and screen sharing have been a fact of life for a couple of decades now; why is it so hard to tell the operating system to strictly not allow anything other than that one window access to the screen?
- SalariedSlave 11mo agothere are operating systems where this is not hard at all.
- zem 11mo agowhich ones, and what is the mechanism to do it? from what I've seen of both linux and windows there is no good central way to toggle this efficiently, and evidently macs also leave it up to various applications to be well behaved.
- Too 11mo agoTangential question. Why does every app still need its own auto-update framework? Shouldn’t we all rely on app-stores and package managers for this?
- ozgrakkurt 11mo agoIt is nice to have it on ubuntu for example. So you can install latest version by downloading it manually and keep getting updates after.
- Too 11mo agoUbuntu has both Snap and custom APT repositories.
- saagarjha 11mo agoBecause the macOS ecosystem is miserable for this.
- _aavaa_ 11mo agoNo we shouldn’t rely on app stores. That would mean giving up a lot of control and putting your app at the whim of the store.
- JCM9 11mo agoDespite people yelling, vibe coding isn’t going away. Developers whining that they can do it better and that it will ruin software forget that business always goes with the “good enough” option. Human receptionists were far better than IVRs and “press 3 for” automation, but it was cheaper and good enough. Now very few companies have human phone operators. SDEs need to come to terms with the fact that the value associated with human coding has been degraded. Salaries don’t just go up forever. Human SDEs aren’t going away, and 10x engineers will still be very valuable, but overall the perceived value of SDEs and their comp as a job family will likely start slide rapidly from this point forward.
- 113 11mo ago> Despite people yelling The "people yelling" are overwhelmingly pro-AI. I find the other side to be relatively quiet.
- fainpul 11mo ago> Human receptionists were far better than IVRs and “press 3 for” automation, but it was cheaper and good enough. Good enough? Depends on who you ask. It was and is clearly terrible for the users (customers). People hate to navigate huge, invisible menus by slowly pressing buttons or speaking single words very clearly, but the business doesn't really care about that and deems it "worth it" for the money saved. This is a pattern one can find all over the place: make something worse but cheaper, as long as someone else, not the business, bears the cost.
- logicallee 11mo agoIn the first coding session: https://ampcode.com/threads/T-9fc3eb88-5aa2-45e4-8f6d-03697f53102d https://ampcode.com/threads/T-9fc3eb88-5aa2-45e4-8f6d-03697f... The user says "Consult the oracle." at the end of the prompt and the AI begins its answer with: "I'm going to ask the oracle for advice on planning custom UI for Sparkle update notifications in the titlebar." What does this refer to? EDIT: Another comment in this thread says "It's currently Sonnet 4.5 by default but uses GPT-5 for the "oracle" second opinion", so I guess that is what it means.
- pawelduda 11mo agoLLMs have brought back my excitement with coding. At work, they help me to kickstart a task - taking the first step is very often the hardest part. It helps me grok new codebases and write boring parts. But side projects is where the real fun starts - I can materialize random ideas extremely quickly. No more hours spent on writing boilerplate or fighting the tooling. I can delegate the parts I'm not good at the agent. Or one-prompt a feature, if I don't like the result or it doesn't work, I roll it back.
- didibus 11mo ago> I have a toddler at home so my "computer time" is very scheduled and very limited I'm slowly wondering if coding AI agents are turning into the best case scenario for workers. Maybe I'm being hopeful haha. But having something that doesn't make you faster but just lets you be less concentrated and focused and mentally lazier while producing the same amount of work in the same time as a super dedicated and focused session would have. That's best case scenario here.
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