Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Oh WOW, cool to see a technique that'll be everywhere in 12 months (the fake pen drawing animations + streaming diagrams as they're produced) first be announced. Do we still do "First!" comments, y'all?

~~[EDIT: you need to put "only for macOS" in way more prominent places, all over -- that offends my soul greatly and may Linus frown upon you all]~~ [EDIT2: I was mistaken!]

This all looks really solid. That said, two remarks:

1. The integration with OS LSPs is quite fun and commendable. Is it possible that the diagrams might get their own LSP, someday? Or is better just staying as direct TS callsites?

2. The choice of the word "IDE" seems like it might get you in trouble, given the small "cannot edit files" detail. Any comments on the decision there, as opposed to, say... "brainstorming tool"? Or hell, "[architectonic] harness"?

3. The psuedocode "semantic diff" thing is an incredible idea, wow. Props there.

4. This language kinda concerns me: "how the requirements that you set were implemented". In my highly-arbitrary development flow, it ideally goes `idea -> spec/reqs -> plan -> test -> impl -> eval -> land -> review`, and this kind of tool seems explicitly targeted towards just the second and third with some partial coverage of their neighbors on either side. More concretely: by adding implementation, don't you lose a powerful specificity selling point and now have to compete with all full harnesses?

5. Suggesting "GPT-6 Luna and Claude Opus 5.5" is presumably a typo? Cause the equivelant of Opus 5.5 is Astra, and even then not really.

thank you! really appreciate it.

1. Yeah, we've thought about this too - at the minimum, we're going to implement a vibe-codeable extension system so that you can add your own diagram types without rebuilding the app. definitely hopeful for some sort of common schema or lsp-shaped thing in the future

2. this is a good point and is something we've considered and struggled with. we ultimately settled on the term 'IDE' because we've found that most people use vscode to review code nowadays, almost exclusively (so it makes it a bit easier to draw the comp in your mind). we're also strongly considering adding an editing feature, but not sure what the exact shape of it is, so decided to go in favor of not shipping it yet - editing tends towards a conductor / superset shape of product. maybe we could try "canvas" instead of "ide" or something? will mull it over more.

4. Yeah, this is definitely tricky. This is why we didn't end up shipping edits as part of this release. Part of the solution here, we think, is tighter integration with the "spec" part of the lifecycle - where whiteboard makes it easier to understand if a spec (like a formal proof) is extensible, generalizable, etc. will mull on this more.

5. yes that's a typo! we're fixing right now - we meant "GPT 6 Sol" (basically, fast TPS, don't need the limits of intelligence really).

Edit: we do have a Fedora Linux build out if that's what you use! releasing stuff on every distro requires some care, so please let us know what you'd want to see it on (re: appimage lol) Edit 2: (5) is fixed! thank you

I don't have much to say, other than these were interesting & helpful responses to understand what you've learned and where you're going. So thanks!

I'll be honest that my initial belief it was for OSX exclusively left me feeling indignant, so knowing I was just mistaken (based on the link up top, tbf) turns me around completly. I do in fact run Fedora, so I'll be trying this ASAP!

I feel Fedora+Debian+Ubuntu+Arch covers all but the long tail of devs, based on vibes alone? You might get bullied if you don't support Nix, but you'll probably be bullied by them anyway lol so no advice on navigating those waters.

https://install.dev.fast/linux ! we added the fedora build because one of our friends swears by it! (was hoping you wouldnt say omarchy lol)

I'd recommend AppImage as distro independent package format

What’s wrong with Omarchy? It’s a great distro, I wish people would put aside whatever dumb political nonsense (that only a very very small group of people care about in the first place) and use/judge software by actual, objective means like performance metrics, feature sets, design, and so on.

1. It's vibe coded

2. It has no clear ethos

3. Not wanting to be killed is not "dumb political nonsense". Of course the fascists think fascism should be status quo -- no one really cares, though.

There are a lot of emerging tools like this for which we will need a name. A similar one I randomly came across (https://github.com/Maksim-Burtsev/merl) calls itself a "Code Navigator."

Along similar lines, I also don't know what we're calling tools like T3 or Superset. They're basically harnesses for harnesses.

They are usually called orchestrators, sometimes Agentic Development Environments (i.e. IDE for agents) if they are complex enough

hmm - those tools are great, but I don't think orchestrator / ADE is quite right either, since this is explicitly not opinionated about where your coding agent is living.

Whiteboard is targeted at almost the opposite problem of the ADE (which is targeted to context switching) - having a dedicated tool to help you understand & participate in the development process in places where humans are high leverage.

maybe also useful: https://x.com/ThePrimeagen/status/2101869827266596973?s=20

I was describing T3/Superset which help you manage context switching. Whiteboard is obviously different.

Or control planes

I like and adopted the term "agent multiplexer" for these.

Just can't warm up to "ADE" (never even liked "IDE") and "agent orchestrator" and "control plane" are just not specific enough to stick.

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