Comment by trjordan

I like the idea of devtools being open source. I also like them to work, and that's what I value more that philosophical purity.

Take his side project, Meat. I've been chewing on this problem for a while. It's a real problem right now: it sucks to read all this LLM-generated code. It's worthwhile to have an LLM summarize it for you.

The problem with that is this particular problem resists vibe coding. I've talked to a bunch of people who have tried to solve it on the side, and it's all sort of ... ok, but still unsolved.

- As mentioned, it takes a while to run. You can modify your other tools, as described, to smuggle the latency.

- LLMs don't know what you care about, so you have to maintain a list of things that you do care about, which is ever evolving. If you don't give it that, it produces slop.

- If you miss something, it hurts. Another layer of swiss-cheese AI doesn't feel right. If you trust the AI, just ask Claude to summarize its work!

- The summaries feel shareable, but the author of the PR is actually the most tolerate of slop about a PR. Your reviewers definitely don't want to read the output of a vibe-coded tool talking about 60% of your PR. They could ask their own Claude!

So, we're building a version (https://tern.sh), and it's not open source, because we want it to be shareable and hosted and support teams -- all that stuff that makes it work. At the end of the day, I'm not here to maintain my tools. I'm here to use my tools to do the job.