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Posted by yan 4 hours ago

Superlogical(www.superlogical.com)
https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
366 points | 251 comments
simonw 3 hours ago|
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.

tough 2 hours ago||
Can't unsee the stark contrast with Anthropic/Bun's recent shenanigans over unreleased rust migrations hehe
fortuitous-frog 2 hours ago||
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
kenforthewin 2 hours ago|||
HN discussions are filled with negative-sentiment AI comments that quickly get upvoted regardless of their connection to reality.
nvme0n1p1 2 hours ago||||
> 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.

simonw 2 hours ago|||
> 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.

nvme0n1p1 1 hour ago||
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.

simonw 1 hour ago||
> 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.

johnfn 1 hour ago||||
> 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.

fhn 1 hour ago|||
Would you release it when it's not complete?
nvme0n1p1 1 hour ago||
> Would you release it when it's not complete?

Nope. I also wouldn't lie and say it's complete when it isn't.

supern0va 1 hour ago||
Can you provide a source where they said it was complete? I can't seem to find any evidence of this.
nvme0n1p1 59 minutes ago||
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.
supern0va 52 minutes ago||
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?

tough 2 hours ago||||
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

simonw 2 hours ago||
> 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.)

woah 2 hours ago|||
They inflamed an online programming language fandom. It's kinda like if they dissed BTS
danbruc 57 minutes ago||
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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

tclancy 7 minutes ago||
At least there's no history of security issues with that.
danscan 46 minutes ago||
I think you may have meant to comment on another post :)
danbruc 36 minutes ago||
No, correct post. But maybe I am misunderstanding the idea behind the post, that is certainly possible.
brandall10 2 hours ago||
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

asar 1 hour ago||
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.

[1] https://github.com/AltanS/collie

pbjerkeseth 1 hour ago|||
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.

simplism 1 hour ago||
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
devy 3 hours ago||
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!

FLeXMurphy 2 hours ago||
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.
Lalabadie 28 minutes ago|||
"I completed the Synacor challenge" is still a good way to get experienced CTOs' attention.
devy 35 minutes ago|||
I actually heard of that.
tiagod 2 hours ago|||
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
gizajob 1 hour ago|||
That’s probably not the type of connection they’re looking for employees to have.
tiagod 22 minutes ago|||
I'm on holiday.
mhitza 1 hour ago|||
But could also be a good software tester if given any kind of remote connection support feature.
goosejuice 10 minutes ago|||
Perhaps they should build a mosh too.
eikenberry 18 minutes ago|||
In case others were interested, they are not a remote-first company and require you to live in LA, NY or London.
gfat 39 minutes ago||
It’s probably a good filter too for applicants
devy 35 minutes ago||
Yes, prefilter for sure.
rixed 1 hour ago||
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:

  If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. 
I'd prefer HN if we made it a habit to editorialize such titles consisting solely of a Domainname or a single word.
dijksterhuis 1 hour ago||
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

rplnt 44 minutes ago|||
One of the worst I've seen was title editorialized from original "Someone: something [x.com]" to just "Something [x.com]".
jeremyjh 1 hour ago|||
Without clicking you’d never know why it’s the title.
dijksterhuis 1 hour ago||
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.
alasano 29 minutes ago||
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.

sigbottle 3 hours ago||
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.

mtrovo 2 hours ago|
Right, but I'm pretty sure this is not the first time somebody thought about solving it.

https://xkcd.com/927/

ksec 3 hours ago||
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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901

exitb 2 hours ago||
They hire for Go.
teodorlu 2 hours ago||
Considering it's going to consume libghostty, I'm betting it'll be Zig.
tristan957 1 hour ago|||
The application layer is in Swift at least.
jeremyjh 2 hours ago|||
libghostty exports a C ABI. For an application from Mitch at this layer I would guess Go.
hoppp 1 hour ago||
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.

pjs_ 1 hour ago||
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?

goosejuice 5 minutes ago|
[delayed]
Too 2 hours ago|
> 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.

trevorhinesley 2 hours ago|
Scrollbar is fine for me? Just styled
munch117 1 hour ago|||
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.
Too 1 hour ago|||
On iOS the whole page jumps up and down when you try to grab it.
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