Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Feature

Mitchell Hashimoto’s extensive post details his use of AI to code a Ghostty1 feature, mirroring my own experience with AI. It excels at prototyping and boilerplate, and is good at explaining existing code. However, it requires constant supervision; I frequently tweak and guide its output. Sometimes, it misses the mark entirely and gets stuck.

Abstraction, not syntax

Alternative configuration formats solve superficial problems. Configuration languages solve the deeper problem: the need for abstraction.

Abstraction, while simplifying expression, comes at the the cost of generating the configuration file, as the article explains. However, the author omits that YAML supports references, offering a degree of abstraction:

# Define reusable base configurations
.defaults: &defaults
  region: "eu-west"

.lifecycle_policies:
  hourly: &hourly-policy
    delete_after_seconds: 345600  # 4 days
  daily: &daily-policy
    delete_after_seconds: 2592000  # 30 days
  monthly: &monthly-policy
    delete_after_seconds: 31536000  # 365 days

buckets:
  - <<: *defaults
    name: "alpha-hourly"
    lifecycle_policy: *hourly-policy
  - <<: *defaults
    name: "alpha-daily"
    lifecycle_policy: *daily-policy
  - <<: *defaults
    name: "alpha-monthly"
    lifecycle_policy: *monthly-policy
  - <<: *defaults
    name: "bravo-hourly"
    lifecycle_policy: *hourly-policy
  - <<: *defaults
    name: "bravo-daily"
    lifecycle_policy: *daily-policy
  - <<: *defaults
    name: "bravo-monthly"
    lifecycle_policy: *monthly-policy

While this is not a while loop, it does remove the repetition, and the need to check each of the values multiple times.

Locating Elements in Hash Arrays Using Pattern Matching in Ruby

Pattern matching in Ruby is still relatively new. I’ve only seen it used sparingly, but this use is concise. I’m still mulling over the syntax. Assigning to feels weird. A few years ago, when numbered parameters (e.g., collection.each { _1.do_something }) were introduced, I didn’t care much for them. Now, I am on a team that uses them constantly and the syntax has grown on me. Perhaps pattern matching like this will take hold in time.

system = {
  users: [
    { username: 'alice', role: 'admin', email: 'alice@example.com' },
    { username: 'bob', role: 'user', email: 'bob@example.com' },
    { username: 'charlie', role: 'moderator', email: 'charlie@example.com' }
  ]
}

system => {users: [*, { role: 'moderator', email: }, *]}
puts email # charlie@example.com

  1. Ghostty is an excellent terminal emulator. After using iTerm 2 for years, I tried ghostty and haven’t looked back. ↩