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Comment by xorvoid | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about doing the same. Build a clone with AI custom tailored for my own quirks. And not bothering to open source it because it's too bespoke for anyone else. How hard was this? Can you share any advice?

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It turned out to be pretty hard in some places. I'm using CodeMirror as the basic building block, which is great, but it does not support WYSIWYG table editing out of the box. Getting that to work requires one to use a separate CodeMirror instance for the cell editor, which makes things rather complicated. For the LLM as well :)

I think I've spent ~20 hours and a couple of $100 of Claude Opus tokens in Cursor. So it's not cheaper or easier, but the amount of frustration saved with having proper Emacs keybindings might delay catastrophic global warming by a few days.

Oh, and of course I'm not compatible with all the Obsidian extensions, nor do I have proper hosting for server-side sync yet. All in all, a fool's errand, but I'm having fun.

Thank you! Re extensions: my thinking was that if you build a clone, then extensions become irrelevant. Just build what you need directly into the software. Extensions systems always seemed to me to be a second class citizen. I think I read an old story of Linus Torvalds using an old fork of microemacs and whenever he disliked something he would just go tweak it's C code (e.g. key bindings). I'm kind of thinking that but done with an LLM. Software could in theory be smaller and more bespoke. And it you want it to work differently, you just prompt an LLM to change the actual source code. Then you don't need higher level configuration/cuatomization interfaces. Simpler software.

This is an interesting topic. I always loved the idea of extensions, for multiple reasons. But they do have their disadvantages, and I'm eager to find out how extension systems will hold up in the time of LLMs.

A major advantage of (certain) extension mechanisms is that you can update them in real-time. For example, in Emacs you can change functions without losing the current state of the application. In Processing or live coding environments, you can even update functions that affect real-time animation or audio.

Another advantage is that they can pose a very nice API, that allows for other people to learn an abstraction of the core application. If you are the sole developer, and if you can spend the time to keep an active memory of the core application, this does not help much. But it can certainly help others to build upon your foundation. Gimp and Emacs are great examples of this.

A disadvantage is that you have to keep supporting the extension mechanism, or otherwise extensions will break. That makes an ecosystem somewhat more slow to adapt. Emacs is the prime example here. We're still stuck with single-threaded text mode :)

Im doing the exact same thing but Im building my Obsidian clone with Rust and gpui and primarily with Codex. So far I estimate Ive been solely vibe coding it for ~15 hours now with only one small change made by hand. Id be interested in comparing notes/our different approaches to this. Feel free to shoot me an email at jerlendds at osintbuddy dot com if you want to chat.

I have a small demo video of yesterdays work here: https://github.com/jerlendds/mdi

Theres since been many additions, Ill update the video tonight

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