Comment by apatheticonion
1 hour 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
I'm sorry and will be the first to admit I went for this too, but I think we're at the breaking point for "using agents to write more tools for agents.
This 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" is part of the problem! 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.
> 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.
Yeah but it’s okay if overwatch takes all of your computer’s effort to run. Imagine if postman used 13 gb of vram
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.
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.
Haha, in my case, it only renders when frames are needed. Otherwise it's basically an image at 0fps.
> no one uses IDEs any more This is false. Plenty of people using IDEs every day
True but the number is also decreasing every day. And I'd imagine that it's decreasing pretty rapidly.
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.
3 replies →
This is awesome and I'm glad things are moving in this direction. I've been playing with Crux (Rust + Native UI) myself: https://github.com/redbadger/crux