akshaysg

I understand the frustration here! As the other commenter noted, it's quite bit tougher to make Haystack as good in the form of an extension, but we do plan to eventually explore this path!

Who knows, one day it may be possible (hopefully without any dystopian updates to human biology)!

Yes the visualization should work!

Not yet -- it's our vision to automate stuff like that!

> Edit: And "to figure out what edits I need to make" is done by any ol' compiler, no?

Kinda? There are cases where you have to drill data down into the callstack (i.e. pass data from above). There are folks who have gone down this path before: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/resharper/Refactorings__Chang... but we intend to automate it even more and show it to the user in an organized way for them to handle large-scale "refactors".

Collaborative and generative AI features. E.g. sharing Haystack workspaces, searching your codebase in the natural language, making edits to multiple files, etc.

Does tldraw work for you? We use Pixi JS, which comes with graphics as well.

Hmm I think someone else has voiced a similar opinion on the wording here, and I actually do agree with you.

What was meant by this statement is really just taking care of plumbing and the visualization of how code relates to one another.

To give you a very basic/silly example of plumbing, if I add a parameter in a function used in 100s of places, doing the manual work to figure out what edits I need to make to those callers is pretty annoying and in most cases mechanical.

If you're lucky, you can do a grep + replace (or just use a default param), but in most cases I find it requires more manual intervention than that.

A lot of people mentioned Light Table, but I didn't know about it until post-launch!

It's interesting that you mention a more 3D view. We were ideating on this, but it's really hard to get right in a way that the user can understand. This is definitely part of our vision for the future though!

EDIT: Deleted the bit about my speculation regarding Light Table since it's false.

For C# unfortunately we're missing a lot of features because the VS Code ecosystem itself lacks them (I think this is due to them being unique to Visual Studio). In most cases, except grabbing incoming/outgoing calls, Haystack should just work.

For Python, it should work just fine!

Most likely we would either have to get the user to do this (we plan to add this as a feature) or use AI to understand when disconnected code (from the LSP standpoint) is indeed connected.

This is a top user request though!

I use the Vim VS Code plugin! It mostly works, but I'm not going to lie: there are a couple of bugs e.g. when you go to definition the Vim selection gets confused because in most cases you get placed into a symbol editor.

I am happy to fix any bugs here. I am the only person I know who uses the Vim plugin in Haystack, so I haven't prioritized fixing the bugs I encounter.

I love the idea of a Haystack VR world! It's a shame that VR software is in a tenuous state due to the biological factors, but I believe it's the future "one day".

It automatically adds connections as you traverse through files/symbols. Not super sure if this is what you mean, but we intend to serve the users "flows" based on queries in the natural language e.g. "what happens when you click the subscribe button from the mouse down all the way to the backend".

I've actually never tried this (it'll probably take awhile to get to this point). Feel free to try it out and report back the results -- I'm curious as well!

I'd love to learn more about what you're envisioning for the caller/callee relationship here! Do you mean recursively show callers/callees as you zoom out?

Yeah just to add onto what Jake said -- in our user interviews we found that folks, even those who are pretty used to old IDEs, do get the hang of Haystack pretty fast. However, developers are very idiosyncratic, so we frequently get pain points that are real problems but are also highly unique to each developer, which is interesting!

Hmm I'll take a look at other licenses to see if there's one that expresses our intent in clearer language.

The intent is that you should be able to make PRs, examine the source code, but not distribute Haystack for commercial reasons.

I believe the license should allow you make PRs and examine code (even in commercial settings), but I'll take a more in-depth look.

Thank you for raising this to my attention!

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.

Good idea. Will add!

This is fair! Not sure if you're a VS Code user, but our goal is to maintain a parity between the keyboard experience in VS Code and the keyboard experience in Haystack. All the keyboard shortcuts in VS Code still live in Haystack.

If you're a Vim user then this is an entirely different story haha.

Yes (all launch HNs are YC-backed)

We actually do try to make the canvas as keyboard navigable as possible. There are a list of keyboard bindings in the "Keybindings and Help" button on the bottom right.

In terms of manually resizing, we actually do try to tile in the viewport. May I know what's causing you to resize it so I can fix it?

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 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.

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?

Oof we've completely neglected this. Will work on this ASAP!

Hmm sorry for the irritation. I have a barrage of questions: 1. Which language is this for? 2. Do you have the relevant language server installed (i.e. the extension for the language specifically). 3. What OS are you on? 4. What else doesn't work? Can you go to definition? Can you see the dependency arrow buttons?

We just made the opt-out available on Linux. let me know if it's working for you!

Windows version is live!

This is a cool concept along with VR, but probably very far down the line for us!