Superlogical
superlogical.com383 points by yan 5 hours ago
383 points by yan 5 hours ago
https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
I really like the bit where he transferred ownership of Ghostty to a non-profit, and is now building this new company on that as an open source dependency: > We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit. Can't unsee the stark contrast with Anthropic/Bun's recent shenanigans over unreleased rust migrations hehe Bun and the Rust pre-release have continued to be open source; the pre-release isn’t exclusive to Claude Code but available to anyone to download and use. There hasn’t been any public motion to indicate they may close source anytime soon. This FUD is so easily fact-checkable that I’m genuinely confused at how it caught on HN discussions are filled with negative-sentiment AI comments that quickly get upvoted regardless of their connection to reality. > I’m genuinely confused at how it caught on Probably because they said AI rewrote it in 11 days, yet haven't cut a release almost 2 months later. If their AI finished it, where's the release? They ported enough of it to run a single app (Claude Code). Good job. But if I ported Linux to Rust and it was only capable of running a single app, should I be able say it was a complete port? We'd all agree that was misleading. It's the same with Bun. The marketing lies simply backfired. > If their AI finished it, where's the release? Producing a stable release for their community of code that had been written by AI in 11 days and had not yet been extensively tested in the real world would be grossly irresponsible. Instead, they made the AI rewrite available as a canary release and shipped it for a month as part of Claude Code to millions of their own users. So... not finished, then? There have been lots of commits between then and now. If I pay someone to build a house and they left me a voicemail saying "Yep the house is finished, it only took us 11 days!" And then later, "No, you can't move in yet, still fixing some last-minute issues (there's no plumbing yet)." We would classify this as: a lie. And if you told it to your investors: fraud. Would it really be so bad for Anthropic to admit that a project of this size takes months instead of weeks? I'm not saying AI is not capable of this. I'm saying that their dishonest marketing has given ammo to their haters. > Would it really be so bad for Anthropic to admit that a project of this size takes months instead of weeks? I think that's exactly what they've done by not shipping a stable release yet. I don't think they've been pushing that "It only took us 11 days!" message nearly as hard as their critics suggest that they have. > If their AI finished it, where's the release? `bun upgrade --canary`. You can use it today. Keeping a large release, like a total rewrite, on canary for a while to iron out bugs is a very reasonable software engineering practice. Would you release it when it's not complete? > Would you release it when it's not complete? Nope. I also wouldn't lie and say it's complete when it isn't. Can you provide a source where they said it was complete? I can't seem to find any evidence of this. Hmm, you are right. The 11 days number came from the Bun blog, not the Anthropic blog. Anthropic has a history of making dishonest claims like this (for example their C compiler) so when I saw the news coverage I assumed this was just another one of those. My mistake. Even then, can you point out where Jarred said this on the Bun blog? Because AFAICT, it seems pretty clear that he said that it took 11 days to get to all integration tests passing, but not to a full release candidate. In his blog post from a few weeks ago, he specifically calls outs: >Bun v1.4 makes Bun faster, smaller, use less memory and gives the team incredibly powerful tools for systematically improving stability going forward: Rust's borrow checker, Miri (which runs for a growing chunk of code in CI), LeakSanitizer, and 24/7 coverage-guided fuzzing for parsers. There's still more to refactor, but things are off to a great start. Perhaps you never perused beyond the HN headline? Well i was mostly talking about the "handing over to a non-profit" control parts. Not the release. but since you said so, could you link me to the release / tag on github? I don't think they've put it out yet? Maybe they won't change licenses, but Bun now feels more like SQLite as in "source code available" kinda open source, than the "come build with us, community first" kind that i think used to be classified on at least for me mentally. No horse in this race, just pattern matching as we meatbags love to do. Idc about the downvoting i can take a bit of heat on my fake internet points > could you link me to the release / tag on github? https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases/tag/canary (I'm not a fan of how they reuse that single tag rather than putting out version-numbered alphas, but they do at least update the description to include the commit hash - "canary" is basically a pointer to the most recent commit hash that they have judged worthy of distributing to their canary users.) They inflamed an online programming language fandom. It's kinda like if they dissed BTS This reminds me somewhat of OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ... [1]. You can paste an Excel chart into a Word document and if you update the data in Excel, the chart in Word will update. You can edit the chart in Word using the Excel UI because you are essentially running an Excel instance inside of Word. You can interact with Excel through an API, no need for a human. But it is painful, you can probably imagine the kind of API you need in order to be able to do all the things you can do with the Excel UI. The idea is amazing, making this work consistently requires effort, and a lot of it. And as only a few applications invested this effort, it only works with a few applications and never really took off outside of Microsoft. I think this used to work with WordPad and maybe even Notepad but it no longer does, you just get an image instead of the chart object in WordPad and nothing at all in Notepad. It is a dying technology. I think you may have meant to comment on another post :) No, correct post. But maybe I am misunderstanding the idea behind the post, that is certainly possible. This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately... - pi-web (https://pi-web.dev/): a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines - herdr (https://herdr.dev/): a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI, can easily spawn or destroy windows based on subagent activity - firstmate (https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate): a meta environment for coding harnesses - more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, managing worktrees, and other SDLC functions, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models have you tried Orca at all? I'm wondering between switching to herdr from it I haven't tried Orca but as a herdr user, but by way of analogy it seems Orca is like VSCode and herdr is like Sublime Text. I've been working on collie[1] a plugin for herdr that runs a web app on the herdr host which can then be served via tailscale for example. This has made accessing my agents on the go a lot easier, paired with session persistence from herdr it's been quite nice to work with. Since you seem curious about these types of tools, might I interest you in ouijit https://ouijit.com/ https://github.com/ouijit/ouijit Its intended as a terminal agent orchestrator aimed at power users who want a little more design than what I like to call 'hackerman' UXes. While not terminal-only, I've been using Orca (https://github.com/stablyai/orca) for the past week and it's been a great experience Wow, that "We're hiring/Career Page" link is geeksmaxxing. First time seeing `ssh superlogical.jobs` would be a way to show job descriptions in terminal! NSA and other companies historically had you jumping hoops and writing mini-exploits to be able to see the email you're supposed to send your resume to. "I completed the Synacor challenge" is still a good way to get experienced CTOs' attention. The ssh thing is really fun, but I wish they had another way to view the openings. I'm on a connection with massive latency at the moment and it's pretty horrible UX in this case That’s probably not the type of connection they’re looking for employees to have. But could also be a good software tester if given any kind of remote connection support feature. In case others were interested, they are not a remote-first company and require you to live in LA, NY or London. They're basically building in one layer what a lot of people are using multiple different apps for currently. Exactly as another commenter said, it's sort of a mix between herdr and proper remote access. I use pi as my primary harness and then Claude code and Codex (but with the desktop app for some very specific things) The last two have remote capability with their own app. With pi, you have extensions that can do remote access, but you still end up with three different places to look to get remote access properly from your phone. People also use tmux and Zellij and any other number of combinations of different apps combined with some kind of remote access, but nothing that's unified and does everything all at once in one place. I feel like that's a good problem to solve if you can do it better. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem however of inverting the flow from one human to many agents to many agents to one agent to one human. Meta, won't comment on the site, won't click. I'm fed up with this category of click baity titles that are designed to be enigmatic rather than informative. The guideline do not mention this, apart maybe from: One of the worst I've seen was title editorialized from original "Someone: something [x.com]" to just "Something [x.com]". The actual header on the page is > We are building the multiplexer for all work. imo this would have been a better way to do the HN submission title (with or without [terminal]) > Superlogical: We are building the [terminal] multiplexer for all work Without clicking you’d never know why it’s the title. that's kinda the point -- titles on HN usually indicate the sort of content that's behind clicking through, and whether it might be something interesting to the prospective reader. this one doesn't because it's the name of the company. I feel like the main benefit of such a thing would be centralization. Part of the issue with the terminal ecosystem is precisely that everything's so fragmented and everybody needs to support arcane terminal protocols and wrap a billion wrappers around each other. The easiest way to solve this is to be a definer yourself rather than an integrator, which I think is what this is trying to be. If we could actually have standardized terminal extensions in one place (you'd be surprised how many extension codes there are in terminal land) that has a different semantics not from the 80s, but still captures the terminal experience, that would be great. The 'cleanest' experience I've got for what I want is mosh + tmux and even that has issues (no block cursor for example). If superlogical's ultimate goal is to revamp the Linux developer ecosystem, all for it. Am potentially worried long term about these kinds of strategies from a political point of view but as long as things stay open source and stay as local dev tools, its fine. Right, but I'm pretty sure this is not the first time somebody thought about solving it. Flashback to when Mitchell first introduce Vagrant [1] to HN, which of course was the how everything from HashiCorp started. I thought it was't that long ago, may be 8, or at best 10-12 years. Turns out 16 years has passed. Curious if it would be another project using Zig. Considering it's going to consume libghostty, I'm betting it'll be Zig. libghostty exports a C ABI. For an application from Mitch at this layer I would guess Go. Mitch said he doesn't like go since they added generics. I checked the available jobs and they are hiring Typescript for web, Go for infrastructure,systems,
Objective-C, swift for Apple I dig the ssh jobs page, UX is very good. I've spend the last ~20 years inside tmux/vim — and the last month almost exclusively in the Codex desktop app, and increasingly am just doing remote control from the ChatGPT app on my phone. Ghostty rocks and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but it seems unclear how much longer this world will exist? The agents have to live somewhere. They address your question in the post. > We're also addressing the most common papercuts of existing tools, such as making scrollback, selection, and scrolling all work natively. Goes ahead and butchers the browser scrollbar. Scrollbar is fine for me? Just styled Invisible until moused over, or scrolled by other means. Barely visible even then. In the wrong place. It may be "just styled", but it's certainly not fine. Agent orchestrators are the IDE dream repackaged. IDEs never really took off, excepting lock-in/monolopolization (Visual Studio, Xcode). They never lived up to the grand vision of the likes of Alan Kay. IDEs of today are still basically just text editors with a file explorer. Agent orchestrators seem similar. The vision is grand but the implementation is just tabbed terminals. I think IDEs took off plenty well, but several got frozen in time. Visual Studio as the IDE for building windows client apps, especially WinForms, was and still is a genuinely incredible and productive experience. The ease of which you could click-and-drag a UI, context switch to logic in the code behind the forms, wire up a web service backend, share domain models and have navigation and search tools understand all of it was great. And the TFS integration was quite good too. You really only had to leave VS to do database work or administer some IIS pools. Unfortunately, it couldn't keep up with the rest of the dev world. "Server Explorer" morphed to include your Azure VMs but froze for 30s each time you opened it. Docker tools came in super late, most Azure services didn't really have a VS tooling experience. The "right click publish" workflow meant for small systems never figured out how to graduate to real-world needs across many teams. Developers had to learn how to use many other tools for modern stuff, and so VS became far less of a center of gravity, often to their annoyance. I think they definitely have the IDE vision in mind and are trying to move off of terminals, based on two parts of the original article > so you can close the application, reconnect from another device, and pick up exactly where you left off. I think this is the remote IDE development dream that no one could quite get right, partly because there wasn't enough reason to run things on a 24/7 device. I think with coding agents that can run in the background this changes. > Sessions can be accessed through the web and native macOS/iOS applications, and sharing a live session with other people is built in from the start. I'd really like to point out that "Sharing a live session" is horrible UX for a terminal multiplexer because the terminal has to be the same size (# of rows/cols) on all viewers' screens, and some of these viewers may be on a phone and others on a laptop. Believe it, I tried myself and there's no good way around the problem. What is interesting is that they added this sentence anyway. This tells me that their long-term endgame is not the terminal. They're most likely trying to build a GUI-based agent IDE and then eventually expand to other work (per their headline of being the "multiplexer for all work") as it all gets more and more agent-based anyways. Well, they're not alone in having that vision. Do you think the future is more sophisticated agent management, or will tooling increasingly fall away to a single chat session with an executive agent of sorts? I expect the product from this company to resemble a combination of Orca + zmx [0]: https://github.com/stablyai/orca
[1]: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx This doesn't seem like a niche that isn't filled. Am I missing out on something by still just using iTerm2 and tmux? You are missing out a bit, but stay content. :) Multiplexers have a lot of little papercuts and limitations when you want consistent and native-to-the-OS behavior to flow all the way between the OS and the apps and connections in the multiplexers. For example, gesture scrolling in a tmux/zellij pane is hard because the right events don't flow through. It's an itch to scratch like designing a good terminal lib (like ghostty.) And then, there's all the unifying and smoothing out of data connections--I imagine they'll be a lot to make sure that, e.g., an ssh session or a Claude code session in a pane can be seamlessly reconnected or never drop when the pane is closed. This takes a lot of hacking to make look seamless in most setups right now. Like mitchell, I write a lot of software around multiplexers, and I've thought about making something similar, but I don't have quite the same level of personal wealth or angel investor connections. :) herdr and mosh are a couple of reference points for this, there are others. I've wondered this myself. I stuck with iTerm2 for a really long time but recently switched to Ghostty. Ghostty definitely seems to renders faster (I say "seems to" because I didn't benchmark or anything). I don't actually use a multiplexer. I'm not sure I understand the use case when most terminal emulators supports tabs + windows (like iTerm2 does). Or you could just launch multiple windows and use your OS's window manager to "multiplex". Are the terminals connected in some way that I'm missing? Regardless, I think Ghostty is a reminder that you can win in a space that's crowded. There's probably a lot of widely used software that would get dropped en masse immediately if someone had the guts to make a better alternative. Typically, the benefit of the mux over just more windows or tabs is the ability to detach sessions from a term and have them continue to run. But yea, the “split a term window into multiple terms” doesn’t have quite as much value in a world of lots of tabs. That said, you can do it under program control on the remote host, so it does save remote login overhead, etc. But for local, less value. I imagine something more like herdr, but done at the terminal level, not inside. But that’s cmux… If you like terminals and tmux, can I suggest you spend a few hours playing with herdr? It clicked for me in a way that a lot of other orchestrators didn't. If its got Mitchell, I’m in. To make it more relevant: right now I mostly rely on tmux. Before that I’ve been a long time user of screen (irssi over ssh people know this play). Looking forward to this. If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out. Yep, a lot of toxic investors in this. Not touching it with a ten foot pole and lost a lot of respect for Mitchell. A couple of the other investors: * https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031 * https://x.com/search?q=from:lennypruss%20israel&src=typed_qu... Thanks for surfacing this. As another user says below, Mitchell had more leeway in choosing his investors than most anyone. His is a dispiriting choice. These comments are absurd about their investors. I’m sure if their investor list included socialist nobody on HN would bat an eye. Ahh that’s right, socialist are “takers” not “makers”. Age old standing on the pedestal of moral superiority. You may be surprised to hear that the famously socialist paulg might also have a problem with this. why are you bringing your socialist boogeymen into this. what's absurd is that this is somehow louder for you than the real, life-changing actions of the genocidal maniac. VCs tend to be a toxic bunch. Hard to avoid that in our business in this case mitchell is an exited founder with a net worth of over $1B so he can be choosier than almost anyone in this regard. Deeply disappointing he is taking money from Guillermo things look different from Billionaire Island than they do to us plebs down here. it's crazy to expect such people to do the "right" thing, they're too far gone. more info please! He thinks ability to vote (and the number of votes you get) should be based on income. https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/business/article/shopify-... Taxes paid was actually what was said. I may be going astray, but I can see a way to degenerate "taxes paid" to "taxes before deductions" to "income since it relates to taxes anyways" It doesn't have to be that complicated. Just absolute terms could have the desired effect. - 1% tax of 10 million = 100k - 20% tax of 100k = 20k Hence, the rich pays more tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_returns_of_Donald_Trump
"Trump paid no net federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years of the past two decades. After the refund, Trump had an average tax bill of $1.4 million per year over the 18 years.[52][176] In 2016, Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax, and in 2017, he paid another $750 in federal income tax." If there was an unequal vote, I am pretty sure rich people would want votes as heavy as possible. Maybe worth mentioning that the founding fathers in the US believed only property owners should vote. If you read it again you will notice that technically he thinks that, to satisfy those who believe the wealthy don't pay tax, Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote. Often the wealthy have no need for income as they already have so much wealth and can easily borrow against that wealth as cash needs present themselves. It is believed (at least as far as the thread went) that the wealthy currently don't pay tax, and thus would be unable to vote, or their vote would count for little, under the proposed since they don't have sufficient income to qualify. That would be true if he advocated for votes according to effective taxation rate or something similar. He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember, which is a rounding error to his income class. Instead, he makes sure to include the idea of stripping low-income people of all voting rights. > which is a rounding error to his income class. Not at all. The idea is that his class claim very little income, if any income. His income class is ~$0 (or believed to be, at least). You can certainly make an argument that the claim isn't true, that the ultra-wealthy are actually already paying huge sums in income tax, but then you cannot take the thread out of context. It was clearly directed at those who believe the wealthy pay no income tax. It literally says so. Did you skip step one and not go back to read it again? > He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember You are correct, approximately, but there would have been no need to remember given step one, so that was clearly ignored. Why? What is the purpose of replying without even reading the comment you are replying to? Lutke's own post was about pension = no votes, which I identify as the thing he decided to actually spent time on. His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no? I don't think memory fails me on the main points. If you think ranking the same read facts differently from you means faulty reading, I don't really owe you the labor of explaining where that fails. > His other tweet is a Musk-like "Good idea" reply to someone else's proposal regarding tax brackets, no? Yes, that is the one we are talking about. The pension comment was posted earlier and isn't directly applicable to the discussion taking place. The other comment did happen, to be sure. I guess we can change the subject if you want to. The comment that came prior to it asserted that the only way to solve the housing crisis is to take the power away from those who most participate in local government (i.e. retired people). To which Tobi suggested that one way to address that is to allow one to choose power or a pension, but not both, suggesting that pensioners have become dependents and thus no longer have any real stake in the future of a locality. Which certainly isn't a novel idea. I've heard the same thing many times from people who are ostensibly poor. Many honestly believe that retirees (a.k.a. boomers) who "got theirs" are why housing is out of their reach. You could make a good case that Tobi was trying to play up "I'm just like the little guy" when he isn't actually, but if that is the case, what is our takeaway from that? Why would they care? The ultra-wealthy impact election through donations, which is many order of magnitudes more impactful than their personal ballot, even if you were to give them 10x weight.
Elon Musk impact on the U.S. election wasn't because he drove to the booth. Care about what? The thread was clearly making fun of those who think the wealthy don't pay any income tax. It literally states that the plan is proposed for those who complain the wealthy don't pay tax, not a plan to be set in motion. Tobi, who fits the wealthy profile of who supposedly doesn't pay tax better than almost anyone, will know well that he already does pay income tax, hence why he humorously threw salt in the wounds of those who don't have a solid grasp of reality. Being wealthy doesn't mean you can't be a troll. You'd think after seeing Musk in action that would have already been obvious to all, but I guess not. > Care about what? About what you yourself said? "Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote". The ultra-wealthy can already influence elections in very significant ways. Getting 5 votes instead of 1, which makes no actual difference to any election, is not something that will suddenly make the ultra wealthy wanting to pay more income tax. What does make a difference though, is if you can prevent a lot of lower income voters from casting their ballots. Also, no, I'm not buying your unfounded claim that Tobi is just joking bro. His doubling down on it in other comments + his past make it clear to me that is seriously thinks like this. > I'm not buying your unfounded claim that Tobi is just joking bro. Fair enough. Let me be a little more precise here: Eric Thor was clearly poking the bear of those who believe that the wealthy don't pay tax. I mean, his voting suggestion concludes with exactly that. Maybe Tobi is so far out to lunch that he didn't notice and took it as an actual plan, but, then again, if you are suggesting that he is that far out to lunch what are we to do with that? > His doubling down on it in other comments The fact that he was writing comments about it suggests that he doesn't take it too seriously. Nobody of sound mind wastes time writing stupid comments on the internet if they have an actual motive. They go out into the real world and make it happen. If he is completely out to lunch like you suggest then anything is possible, but the more likely explanation still seems to be making fun of those who don't believe the wealthy pay tax. If people were making shit up about you, claiming that you didn't pay any tax, you'd likely end up making fun of them too.
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I'd prefer HN if we made it a habit to editorialize such titles consisting solely of a Domainname or a single word. If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
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