Comment by cobolcomesback | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cobolcomesback | Hacker News Reader

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I think you probably meant to write “underestimate”. But I think you are overestimating how difficult it is!

I’m not exaggerating when I say all I had to do was prompt “build me an LLM coding harness like Claude code, but make it so that I can resume sessions from OpenCode and Pi as well” and that’s it, and it was done within an hour.

Did it have warts? It’s been working nearly flawlessly, but there have been a couple of really minor things. One of the things I realized quickly was that it didn’t have a WebFetch tool built in, so I prompted “add a webfetch tool” and it did it within 5 minutes. Warts are trivially fixed.

The things that really differentiate software now are the ideas behind them, not the implementation. So if (like the OP) you’re looking at a tool and going “well mine does that too…”, so what? If it’s just a re-implementation of the same ideas, anyone can recreate it (and add on their own customizations to boot).

Personally, I am getting frustrated with the amount of people trying to pitch me their tool they made. Tools are a dime a dozen. Share with me your ideas, and I’ll share with you mine, but I’m not gonna adopt your tool.

> Did it have warts? It’s been working nearly flawlessly, but there have been a couple of really minor things. One of the things I realized quickly was that it didn’t have a WebFetch tool built in, so I prompted “add a webfetch tool” and it did it within 5 minutes. Warts are trivially fixed.

Sure, and then tomorrow it's compaction, then worktrees, then an annoying buffer scrolling bug, image clipboard handling, etc etc. I don't buy for a minute that a one-liner prompt creates a perfect program because I know from experience it doesn't. You are inheriting the maintenance of a non-trivial program. That's perfectly fine if you want to tinker and spend time on that but I would rather offload that to someone who wants to spend more time thinking about those problems than I do.

> Personally, I am getting frustrated with the amount of people trying to pitch me their tool they made. Tools are a dime a dozen. Share with me your ideas, and I’ll share with you mine, but I’m not gonna adopt your tool.

I'm not sure I follow this line of thinking. Obviously, juggler is the result of an author who has spent a great deal amount of time thinking about an idea. It is the manifestation of the author's ideas. I agree that the amount of vibe coded slop out there that people think is marketable is ridiculous, but Juggler doesn't really look like that. It's still worthwhile to evaluate well thought out tools IMO.

> Sure, and then tomorrow it's compaction, then worktrees, then an annoying buffer scrolling bug, image clipboard handling, etc etc. I don't buy for a minute that a one-liner prompt creates a perfect program because I know from experience it doesn't.

Every thing you listed works out of the box. Believe it or not, it’s true! And creating tools like this is only going to get easier as LLM models progress.

Your comment very much reminds me of comments from 2023 saying that LLMs would never be able to write working code, or be able to generate lifelike pictures, or be able to find security issues… but look around you, they’re doing all of those things already!

> I'm not sure I follow this line of thinking. Obviously, juggler is the result of an author who has spent a great deal amount of time thinking about an idea.

Awesome! That’s why I asked the author why they wanted attention. I want to hear more about those ideas behind juggler. What makes it special? Why does the author (who has tons of experience in software) think juggler is different? What were the obstacles that the author overcame while building it? That’s what I want to know, but these comments share none of that. Instead they just say “I also built a tool that does the same thing, I wish people would use my tool instead.” Why in the world would I?

I'm using these tools in a professional capacity everyday just like you and everyone else and I 100% know they don't produce code that works perfectly out of the box. That's either horseshit, or your definition of working software and mine are very different.

To answer your question about what I was trying to do that was different:

- a multi-client, state-machine based architecture rather than a naive LLM loop

- a bunch of UX features that I wasn't seeing in other harnesses (although of course they're all churning away in terms of UX so this changes all the time)

The difficult bits were:

- getting the data model right. This was a lot harder than it looks!

- getting an automated UI test framework in place that was robust enough to trust that incoming changes wouldn't break something. Originally I hoped to get away without this (I've never worked on a project before where we had automated UI tests!) but it was just a shitshow. I spent a couple of months getting this right, but it turned the whole project around and it's now incredibly quick and safe to make changes.

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