haha.. Couldn't have worded it any better. I was excited too.
29 karma · joined October 22, 2025
I don't use agents at all and I think that building agent/Ai-first is gonna push away people like me (who don't want to deal with agents or any related concept or even git tbh). I'd genuinely say generalise into a Virtual Desktop typer thing.
In your blog, you mentioned that each tile is sorta like a computer (sandbox?) in itself actually containing AND running the work. That's brilliant! Now, if you could make it possible that one single tile could fill the entire screen, like a typical desktop view, on demand. Incase I just want absolute focus on one thing (I'm not always looking across all three monitors) and not be in 'Canvas mode' seeing all my Virtual Desktops.
I could also see myself working across three (or more) tiles where I've got docs in chrome, vs-code open in another and something else (more docs? Terminal? Doesn't matter). Fact is that the infinite canvas literally replaces me having to buy two - three monitors to get the same feel. I could now buy a single large curved one and have infinite monitors.
I had an inkling of this feeling when I saw Omarchy (A tile-based Linux distro from Basecamp / 37signals). What I thought was missing was infinite-ness and a little spatial something? I actually literally thought, what if those tiles didn't squish together like that and the BG were a 2D infinite canvas?
If you pull this off just right and actually focus on getting the desktop version right first (I believe that's where your users are), I believe you may have stumbled onto a different kind of operating system paradigm for a workflow issue we try to solve with even more physical monitors.
I never shut off my PC so I can imagine long lived virtual monitors wayyy off in the canvas ether with all that work still open and waiting until I'm ready for that frame of mind.
I don't have anything to say about the disappearing message except that it's cool as a way to ping or get someone's attention but a dedicated chat box? window? Just a little foldable flourish in the bottom left or right corner so yu can directly 'chat' with someone persistently who's in your space (or you're in theirs) is way more healthy for a serendipity than a disappearing message where it's kinda like an implicit race condition and loses the asynchronous nature of letting me consider a text before I reply especially in work settings. I'd also not want to give access to my entire canvas ether as opposed to selectively allowing access to specific virtual desktop lol
As for 3D? Meh I don't know. Don't need that but other people may like it. I'm just approaching this from a workflow angle. Love the whimsy regardless.
I absolutely want this, I would absolutely pay for this, I think this is a great product in the Figma range and I absolutely wish you all the best of luck because this is awesome. Just focus on the operating system /workflow angle for a desktop use-case first. I couldn't try it (don't have a Mac) but I got the idea from the video.
Good luck, guys! And ykw? I wonder if I could fork around with Omarchy and give it infinite canvas since it's already 95% there. Never mind the social feature or 3D graphics yet.
Do note that I only use LLMs in the ChatUI, I never use agents. I don't believe having a blackbox codebase managed by entities with a half-life of 'delete conversation' or 200k tokens is a responsible idea. In ChatUI, I lay the ground rules, kill assumptions about our working relationship, give it foundational context on the problem and codebase we're working on, explain the problem and then we have a conversation about it and I gradually disclose more logically context as it becomes relevant. So, to directly answer your question, maybe I'm missing out on a ton of upside by not using the absolute best but I'd say familiarizing yourself with a specific model has all the benefits of having a human friend you've grown up with... except your buddy's a savant and would absolutely love to help!
What tends to happen is that I’ll reach a junction with Claude where I’m reading its output and starting to manually make changes yeah?. The output is usually already very good, close enough to what I want that it's way more efficient for both of us if I just carry it the rest of the way myself. Or I 'ruin' the clean flow by veering off into questions, clarifications, or broader changes. After a while of this back-and-forth review process, after definitely attaining an 'improvement checkpoint', I scroll back up to what I think of as a 'conversational context checkpoint' and then summarise all the changes we’ve converged on as succinctly as possible including the 'why' (verrry important to always tell them the why). I edit that checkpoint message, and that becomes a new branch of the conversation starting from there. All the noise, all the intermediate negotiation, disappears, and what remains is a compressed version of only what I want the model to carry forward.
Sometimes, if the changes are too extensive to easily summarise, I go even further back, one message above where Claude started generating files. I edit that instead, rebuild the context with only what matters, and then present the corrected output as if I authored it myself sometimes even saying something like, 'So Claude I tries to implement this myself, what do you think? Does it match what we agreed on? Do you disagree with anything or have questions or see issues?'. It works surprisingly well up to even catching new subtler problems in that improved code. It’s very close to your idea of context sculpting, just executed through manual, human-intuited branching rather than model-side compaction.
The interesting constraint I want to point out is judgement. The model doesn’t really have it in the human sense. Knowing what is important is exactly the hard part. Prompting it into the right shape figuring that out for itself is almost like an art form, whereas for the human there’s already an intuitive sense of... salience? running underneath everything. That's the sauce really. You, the human, are the most efficient and effective OUTER_MODEL
Another difference is structural. In this workflow, you are effectively editing your own message and then forking the conversation from that point downwards. It behaves more like a git branch than a linear chat.
I’ve never fully bought into agents either, at least not in the sense of something that meaningfully replaces the human in the loop. I don't want to either 'cause what then? Even if agents work, the question becomes who maintains the code, who understands it deeply enough to extend it without decay. So even this manual technique still depends on full human involvement. Each prompt is modular, structured, information dense, and intentionally non-open-ended. That non-open-endedness is like avoiding a circular dependency where groups of related contexts are littered all over and yu can't pick a proper checkpoint for the chunk of work you're currently doing. This again assumes you're solving problems in logical bite-sizes anyway.
But I consider prompting as less like conversation and more like maintaining modular, versioned intent. It should feel like a sciency discipline rather than purely improvisation Al. Steer it, don't let it steer and never append either; wipe the slate with an edit or new conversation but an edit keeps more of the nuances of that specific model instance. It's very interesting research you've done here. Well done to yu and codex!
EDIT: typo!
So the idea of feeling tricked based on how much effort went into it feels foreign to me. If I got something out of it, that's enough. Even if it took the author and a model no time at all.
The ‘feeling tricked’ part, to me, suggests a kind of adversarial framing with AI outputs that I think is curious. I’m just engaging with the text in front of me, whether it’s a story, a README, or a wall of technical writing. If it communicates clearly and has substance, I don’t think much about where it came from. I think much of this just comes down to what people think they’re engaging with when they read, the work itself or the mind behind it.
And tbh, filtering what’s worth the attention has always been on the reader. There’s plenty of human written slop too. I tend to judge everything the same way on my way to deciding whether to keep reading or drop it.
The images hit that sweet spot too. Just enough and few in between to support the plot without getting in the way, just enough to like visually clarify without over-explaining. It all worked together even with minor contradictions around labelling. The inconsistencies wasn't sticky enough to disrupt the plot at all.
Over the MY years I’ve seen an idea play out in movies, books, articles, short stories, that the “humanity only unites when faced with an alien intelligence”. What gets me is how people can enjoy something like this, then immediately recoil once they figure it was actually AI-assisted enough to be largely Ai generated. Does that actually diminish the substance of what they just experienced? I don’t think it does but I'm not gonna argue such a subjective stance.
Someone in the comments suggested tagging AI-assisted work with sth like an “LLM:” prefix, similar to “ShowHN:”. That feels weird to me. LLMs might not be sentient, but they’re clearly capable enough that the output should stand on its own, alongside the intent and effort of whoever’s guiding it. Pre-labeling it just bakes in bias before anyone even engages with the work. It’s not that far off from asking human authors to declare their race or nationality up front. 'cause really if nothing about my direct experience changed, why should my judgment?
In a tech-forward space like HN, I’d expect a stronger bias toward judging things on merit alone. Just read the thing. Let it speak first. I sincerely hope this isn't gonna be an 'LLM vs Humanity' thing 'cause personally, I find the idea of a different kind of intelligence extremely interesting.
No, No... Of course all that matters isn't just the code. My framing was about how organizations model the work SWE do economically.
>Visual programming was going to destroy the industry, where any idiot could drag and drop a few boxes and put together software. Turns out that didn't work out and now visual programming is all but dead. Then we had consultants and software consultancies. Why keep engineers on staff and have to deal with benefits and HR functions when you can hire consultants for just long enough to get the job done and end their contracts. Then we had offshoring. Why hire expensive developers in markets like California when you can hire far cheaper engineers abroad in a country with lower wages and laxer employment law. (It's not a quality thing either, many of these engineers are unquestionably excellent.)
It seems like we're agreeing along the same tangent. With this argument, you're admitting that businesses do see SWE as cogs in a wheel and seasonally try to replace them... The seasonality of 'make the engineer replaceable' fads really does point to businesses trying to simplify what devs actually do since most of what they measure is working code output because it’s a tangible artifact (this is waht the OP meant by implying being a working code producer at work). Knowledge, judgment, architectural intuition, and domain understanding are harder to quantify, so they disappear from the model even though they ARE the real constraint. So for the record, I do agree with you that code isn't everything but I maintain that SWEs are modelled based on working codes produced even in more successful companies that invest in domain knowledge and long-term system understanding.
Metrics, performance reviews, sprint velocity, delivery timelines, all orbit around observable artifacts because those are what management systems can actually track objectively and equitably. It's a handy abstraction just like looking only at the ins/outs of a logic gate as opposed to looking at the implementation and wiring. Of course, a NOT gate would get upset over being called a 'bit flipper', it's not all thar physically exists but from our POV, it doesn't exactly matter. This applies to human labor even if a leaky abstraction w
'you must be mad'. Aggressively hilarious. Love it!