Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature
2 days ago
- Developer Mitchell Hashimoto used AI tooling to build an unobtrusive macOS automatic update feature for Ghostty terminal.
- He emphasizes planning with AI, iterative prototyping, and human cleanup after AI-generated code, not replacing human expertise.
- The feature shows update status in the titlebar or bottom-right corner without interrupting user workflow or creating modal windows.
- AI helped with UI prototyping, simulation scenarios, and filling in code scaffolds, but failed on some bugs requiring manual intervention.
- Total cost was $15.98 over 16 agentic coding sessions, with an estimated 8 hours of wall-clock work across three days.
- Hashimoto advocates sharing agentic coding sessions publicly to educate others on effective use of AI as an assistant.