Comment by apatheticonion

2 hours ago

Agreed. I started writing a desktop GUI harness in Rust using native desktop GUI APIs.

Claude, Codex, Opencode, everything is Electron. With agents and solid engineering fundamentals, I set out to prove that we don't need to take that shortcut any more and we can, in fact, ship high quality/performance applications.

It's still early days - but I got something basic working. I've embedded the Goose harness as a back end and am using the UI framework used by the Zed editor.

https://github.com/alshlabs/quill

I'm keeping the source closed for a little while. Also if anyone from the major labs is hiring, hihi, I make quality things.

Also I'm aware that this is a rip off of vscode's design. I like their UI, lends itself well to projects and so on. In a different life I might have ported vscode to Rust - but no one uses IDEs any more haha

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apatheticonion

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weitendorf  1 hour ago

I'm sorry and will be the first to admit I went for this too, but "using agents to write more tools for agents." is literally the problem.

The purpose of software is to help people with their problems. I think it's easy to tell ourselves that other people want to use our tools which we really made to help ourselves (especially if them using it also helps ourselves even more!). And also, this is all so new and there are real opportunities that it is good to learn and try new things and be open to actually making something valuable.

But! Other people extensively using agents are literally the last people who would pay for a project like this! And unless it's a fulltime job like it is for a 5 or so well resourced tech companies, it's hard to make something as good and useful as them. I say this as someone who spent a long time on this problem as my fulltime job.

We should still have fun with our work. But literally, "software for other software people, that solves the problem of us needing to write more software for writing software, faster", who is that helping? There are no constraints or end users besides ourselves, and half of that is not so much it benefiting us through productivity, but learning new things and play - again, important. But there's a reason so many people are doing this and I think it's because they don't have to go outside and solve someone else's problem, or do something unusual, or involving unfun non-software aspects - agents are fun! But how many random people's agent have you installed?

IMO: if the technology does not help a non-technology person live a better life, and especially if it involves "using an agent to build a framework for agents" we should do some more, deeper introspection about what problem we are actually solving and whether or not we're being ambitious. And I say that not to pick on you but myself.

  • apatheticonion  1 hour ago

    I see your point. In this case I'm intentionally reinventing the wheel for the sake of correctness and quality.

    For the end user, the outcome will likely be the same when compared to opencode or similar, but the journey will be nicer

    I expect no one to actually use it though, however nice it might be to hope for that

    • weitendorf  29 minutes ago

      I do wish you well and think it's good for us to work on these tools if only to help ourselves better understand how to work with these things, and have fun. I've actually had a blast working on agent tooling with agents too.

      What I fear is that as computer people we can easily convince ourselves to avoid doing things in-person or which involve leaving the comfort of our inner/online lives, or having to bridge technology with some other thing that is very much not technology (like non technical people, or sales and marketing), or is but is not easy to work with (like a robot). But there are actually a ton of problems that need solving there, and they are uncomfortable because it might involve looking stupid or showing up somewhere nobody knows you, or unknown-unknowns.

      Personally I am embarrassed at myself not for trying to solve my own problems (I want to spend all day doing tech stuff and make money selling it to other people doing tech stuff) but for how long it took me to realize that I was either anxious or thought I was above doing something more concrete and mundane.

      For example, this is a popular music venue in the city I live in https://www.thegreatnorthernsf.com/ - Claude and Codex have been out for months; it would take like 20 minutes to give their site a makeover, mostly just watching AI work.

      This is how local government events are coordinate in the most technologically forward city in the world. Double irony that the product is provided by one of the biggest tech companies in the city, too. But it's literally just a web form and some poor government worker is apologizing in the event details that the signups are broken: https://sfrpd.my.salesforce-sites.com/SFRPDJob?sShiftId=a09P...

      I think agents are very fun and cool but I'm increasingly convinced that my job is to use them to help this type of user, not developers.

bob1029  2 hours ago

> Naturally, game engines are crazy optimized, so the UI runs butter smooth and uses pretty much no resources.

We should build everything using a AAA FPS engine loop now that we can. The amount of shit that happens in one rendered frame of overwatch is wild. And then we go and do like 200 of those per second.

  • mlnj  1 hour ago

    One recent performance issue that was raised by a customer was in the end a tiny svg animation loop that was on all the time even when the tab was inactive. So no game engine loops for my customers.

  • well_ackshually  1 hour ago

    No you won't. Firstly because your software is one of dozens running and it doesn't get to take the privilege of fucking over my battery consumption and asking for my GPU to spin so you can edit markdown, and also because 2D rendering is miserable and non-performant in every single game engine you can think off. 2D sucks to make, 2D eats half of your frame time by just existing and slicing those triangles.

neta1337  2 hours ago

> no one uses IDEs any more This is false. Plenty of people using IDEs every day

  • R1ck404  2 hours ago

    True but the number is also decreasing every day. And I'd imagine that it's decreasing pretty rapidly.

    • weitendorf  1 hour ago

      claude code and codex are literally IDEs. as are any other remote agent that you use like them

      you're not "in the terminal", in fact the product is selling you on the concept of being "in the terminal" as you work, but you're literally just asking a computer with ~full userspace access and direct ability to compile and run programs to do stuff for you, in an environment with "plugins" and like 30 "slash commands" and menus. it has auto-review and manages git for you and even writes your PR descriptions and other messages to your colleagues if you want. that is an integrated development environment.

      I think if you can just run a one line bash command from a big company's website, and then just ask it to set up git and everything else for you (which it will default to anyway), and it tries to sell you on third party plugs in and Skills and managed proxies like MCP, and workflows, you are just using the new kind of IDE. And there is nothing bad about that because it makes us more productive to not have to mess with things like that. The idea that you are not using an IDE, or that we are "better" because the IDE looks like the development environment of the type of developer we'd admired in the post (but literally has the value proposition of being the easy way to accomplish that), is dangerous.

    • PostOnce  2 hours ago

      So what are they going to review the slop in? Or are they just not gonna bother checking?

      We are gonna see some Knight Capital level fuckups shortly.

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