This looks quite useful! However could Haystack be made an VSCode extension instead of a fork? So I could use this in Cursor, which is also a VSCode fork.
So many YC folks are forking VSCode for various reasons that mostly revolve around "can't monetize extensions, want to own the platform".
I don't think any of them will be successful, IMO. You want to be an extension because getting software approved is _hard_ at bigcos, it's much easier to trojan horse on an existing tool.
I think Cursor is already looking successful. Most VS Code people I know (including myself) have switched over. I love the idea of Haystack (I was a fan of Light Table back in the day) but if I have to pick between a better UI and an assistant who perform most simple code transforms by English language request, saving hour(s) per day, I’m picking the assistant.
I could be wrong but I don't believe it's difficult to monetize an extension.
The reason I think there has been an explosion of VS Code forks (e.g. Supermaven, a very successful extension) is that being an extension in VS Code is limiting insofar as what you're able to change in terms of the UI and UX.
You are right about the difficulty of getting into big companies. However, we developed a standalone editor because it's easier to build on top of, and we eventually want to build a very portable browser-based editor that utilizes the canvas view for pull requests, arbitrary code, etc.
We're going to make a "Haystack-lite" extension in the future! I understand the pain here. We chose to go with a VS-code fork so we could maximize the canvas features. I am curious if you would find the "canvas" view distracting when it's on a sidebar as opposed to the main editor?
Thinking about it, a sidebar "canvas" could be more useful comparing to the main editor to me:
* when reading code, I found I jump back and forth the call stack quite often, a visualization of this could help with this navigation, especially with some properly designed shortcut keys.
* I mostly code on MacBook so screen real estate is precious. The canvas as main editor looks like waste a lot of screen space. But the canvas in a sidebar do not have this issue.
candiddevmike|1 year ago
I don't think any of them will be successful, IMO. You want to be an extension because getting software approved is _hard_ at bigcos, it's much easier to trojan horse on an existing tool.
jitl|1 year ago
akshaysg|1 year ago
The reason I think there has been an explosion of VS Code forks (e.g. Supermaven, a very successful extension) is that being an extension in VS Code is limiting insofar as what you're able to change in terms of the UI and UX.
You are right about the difficulty of getting into big companies. However, we developed a standalone editor because it's easier to build on top of, and we eventually want to build a very portable browser-based editor that utilizes the canvas view for pull requests, arbitrary code, etc.
williamcotton|1 year ago
This was at least the motivation for Positron, AFAIK.
akshaysg|1 year ago
bhy|1 year ago
* when reading code, I found I jump back and forth the call stack quite often, a visualization of this could help with this navigation, especially with some properly designed shortcut keys.
* I mostly code on MacBook so screen real estate is precious. The canvas as main editor looks like waste a lot of screen space. But the canvas in a sidebar do not have this issue.