alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI
Hello everyone. I've been working on this experimental editor called Huzzah.
I've been working almost exclusively with coding agents since January of this year, and over the past few months I began to feel utterly exhausted by them. They're great, but I'm finding it more and more tedious to write full sentences for every change I want. Not only that, but it seems there's a complexity limit for codebases - beyond a certain point the agent begins confusing itself.
I'd like to go back to writing code, but I don't want to go all the way back to fully manual coding. So I've come up with this interaction paradigm where you:
1. write pseudocode in whatever way makes the most sense to you
2. on save, the editor synchronizes your work to real source code
3. the pseudocode is persisted alongside the generated code, making your prompt effectively a stored record of intent.
Right now it's just a proof of concept - installation instructions are here in the readme: https://github.com/danielvaughn/hz
You can also watch a video of it in action here: https://x.com/danielvaughn/status/2090456808431165715
Cheers!
Comments
> There’s no reliable record of human intent.
Every engineer I have ever mentored got a lesson on how to write a good commit message that included this. This is exactly that.
Further Huzzah from skimming it over seems to be re-inventing documenting your code.
Together I can only surmise that the author is new out of school or has simply not yet worked on a team with good coding practices.
I’ve been thinking about something along these lines for some time. I really like the direction of this.
The challenge I see more broadly is we (as engineers now empowered by LLMs) are trying to find the right level of abstraction to operate in. Writing long form sentences and (sometime) reviewing the output feels too far away. But having an LLM work directly with you in an IDE feels too close to “the old way”.
Personally for me the approach here still feels a little too close to the lower level old way, but it’s better than the two approaches above.
Excited to see where you take it!
Dumb question:
Why not just put an instruction into your favorite harness’ system prompt: “If I give you pseudo code, spell out my intent, and then write and test it in real code.”
Isn't this just spec-driven development in a different language?
Hmm. Interesting idea.
What about multi-file / larger changes? How would you express files being connected, imports, and exports? Or are you thinking the hz files are disposable per change?
not sure if the hz file artifact is needed, you can enter pseudocode directly into chat or even on an existing code file and with minor comment agents will be able to work with it. i write this type of pseudocode to existing code files often to great results.
curious if you’ve tried Kiro or spec-driven development? that seems like it would solve at least some of the issues you raised with agent based development, albeit in a different way without the emphasis on pseudo code
I think the idea of having a human-written persistent document describing the operation of the code is a great idea. This document acts as the prompting interface instead of the chat window and changes can still be tracked. Surely something as simple as a skill.md can be made for such a setup, right? I think the pseudocode style is a seperate axis to this setup.
I'd call this one Micropilot.
As in micromanagement.
This is basically a compiler, but we’re moving up a layer of abstraction.
Are we supposed to be able to read the examples with our eyes? It looks like black text on a very dark grey background on my iPhone.
EDIT: same on Firefox on my Mac (macOS Ventura).
Definitely an approach worth exploring! I actually started to look into semi formal spec language like Quint because I wanted something more structured then prose, so I feel like this goes into the right direction.
Writing fizzbuzz requires that you understand algo + you credit card, while agent requires only your credit card. I believe most of people will pick the 2nd one.
You seem to be conflating two things: how to prompt, and how to share sessions. You can already use pseudo-code today if you want to. As for sharing, you can commit (a link to) it, use `git notes` (as I do), or a service like entire.io.
I think you should work on your differentiation. The session management stuff is the greater concern, in my opinion; pseudo code is not a novelty.
[flagged]
I'm confused, it looks like you've just written a new terse language that now costs money to compile?