Comment by OlaProis
10 hours ago
Ha! I appreciate the compliment (I think?). To be transparent: yes, AI tools were used during development — they're fantastic for boilerplate, documentation, and exploring unfamiliar APIs.
But this wasn't "2 sessions" — Ferrite has been in development for months with ~30,000 lines of Rust across 50+ modules. The Mermaid renderer alone is ~6000 lines of layout algorithms (Sugiyama-style graph layout, sequence diagram activation tracking, nested state machines, etc.).
AI helped ALOT, but there's no "generate full app" prompt that produces working text editors with native diagram rendering, rope-based text buffers, and custom window chrome. Still takes understanding the domain.
That said, you're right that the development velocity is higher than 5 years ago. Exciting times!
I want to see the work done by human beings, not just the AI output. "Open source" to me is sharing the input required, idealistically as much as possible. Without including at least prompts and separating AI output from manual revisions this GitHub repo feels more like publishing "open weights" does, definitely useful but for the most part only for its intended purpose instead of also teaching how to do something similar myself. (See also recent discussion about Android publishing source less often: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524379)
None of this should be considered critical of this project specifically, very few share "how the sausage is made". You're breaking new ground with a comment about being AI generated prominent in the README, I hope that catches on.
> "Open source" to me is sharing the input required [...]
I don't disagree with your sentiment, I am also more interested in human-written projects, but I'm curious about how this works. Would a new sorting network not be open source if found by a closed source searching program, like AlphaDev? Would code written with a closed source LSP (ie. Pylance) not be open source even if openly licenced? Would a program written in a closed source language like Mojo then be closed source, no matter what the author licences it under? The line between input and tool seems arbitrary at best, and I don't see what freedoms are being restricted by only releasing the generated code.
Yep, it always seems easy from the outside until you start doing it. Then unless you are doing a crud web app you quickly run into issues where unless you know what you are doing- Claude Code won’t help you.
Exactly. The AI is great at "write me a function that does X" or "convert this to async." It struggles with: - Graph layout algorithms (crossing minimization, layer assignment) - State machine interactions (how does undo interact with sync scroll when switching view modes?) - Performance debugging (why is syntax highlighting slow on scroll?)
The domain knowledge still matters. AI just compresses the boilerplate time.