[valianter]

I get that this is a completely new idea so adoption is going to be slow but I'm curious to see how your user interviews and user research is going. I'm a young dev but I'm not even sure if I would use this because the way I've learned to code is already so ingrained into the traditional IDE. Nevertheless, congrats on the launch!

[yatvij]

Jake from Haystack here! Thanks for the interest. We've been doing a lot of user interviews with folks on our discord (and folks we know in real life) to understand issues in the onboarding process, find problems that make people churn off, etc with the long-term goal of increasing retention. A lot of our time lately has been spent on fixing these bugs and improving the new-user experience. As a result of this we found that retention on later launches got much better!

[verdverm]

Have you done user research outside your fan base to show this experience is something developers want?

Is it desirable enough to get them to switch IDEs?

[akshaysg]

Yeah just to add onto what Jake said -- in our user interviews we found that folks, even those who are pretty used to old IDEs, do get the hang of Haystack pretty fast. However, developers are very idiosyncratic, so we frequently get pain points that are real problems but are also highly unique to each developer, which is interesting!

[necovek]

Totally: I couldn't stop thinking about actually generalizing this to a workspace/desktop so I could apply similar principles with multi-windowed Emacs — a window manager that also connects windows ;)

Looks really intriguing, but Emacs is really hard to leave behind.

But I do believe this pattern applies to more things than just IDEs, and might even replace multi-workspace setup. Keep at it and hopefully you are successful and this pattern keeps evolving!