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Comment by bhy | Hacker News Reader

This looks quite useful! However could Haystack be made an VSCode extension instead of a fork? So I could use this in Cursor, which is also a VSCode fork.

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So many YC folks are forking VSCode for various reasons that mostly revolve around "can't monetize extensions, want to own the platform".

I don't think any of them will be successful, IMO. You want to be an extension because getting software approved is _hard_ at bigcos, it's much easier to trojan horse on an existing tool.

I could be wrong but I don't believe it's difficult to monetize an extension.

The reason I think there has been an explosion of VS Code forks (e.g. Supermaven, a very successful extension) is that being an extension in VS Code is limiting insofar as what you're able to change in terms of the UI and UX.

You are right about the difficulty of getting into big companies. However, we developed a standalone editor because it's easier to build on top of, and we eventually want to build a very portable browser-based editor that utilizes the canvas view for pull requests, arbitrary code, etc.

Bigcos not that hard to get into. It's just an entirely different process. You would need to hire someone with that kind of experience.

I think Cursor is already looking successful. Most VS Code people I know (including myself) have switched over. I love the idea of Haystack (I was a fan of Light Table back in the day) but if I have to pick between a better UI and an assistant who perform most simple code transforms by English language request, saving hour(s) per day, I’m picking the assistant.

Yeah the productivity optimization here makes sense. We intend to add generative AI features unique to the canvas UI as well to ensure our users don't lose productivity.

I am curious what features you like about Cursor the most? For me it's the CMD/CTRL+K -- I've had mixed experiences with the chat window and Composer.

Cmd-K and tab complete with or without writing some guiding comments

I could be wrong but one of the main reasons to fork VS Code is because extensions have a limited UI.

This was at least the motivation for Positron, AFAIK.

We're going to make a "Haystack-lite" extension in the future! I understand the pain here. We chose to go with a VS-code fork so we could maximize the canvas features. I am curious if you would find the "canvas" view distracting when it's on a sidebar as opposed to the main editor?

Thinking about it, a sidebar "canvas" could be more useful comparing to the main editor to me:

* when reading code, I found I jump back and forth the call stack quite often, a visualization of this could help with this navigation, especially with some properly designed shortcut keys.

* I mostly code on MacBook so screen real estate is precious. The canvas as main editor looks like waste a lot of screen space. But the canvas in a sidebar do not have this issue.

1. You can hop back and forth using the "backward/forward" buttons in the top bar, similar to VS Code. Not sure if I misunderstood here. 2. That's fair. You can "pin" editors on the canvas, which allows you to fullscreen editors.

I think part of what makes this work is that ultrawidescreen monitors aren't as impossibly expensive as they once were, so screen real estate can be spent and your spacial reasoning can take over. It might just not work well on a laptop screen.

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