st_asqi's comments

10 hours up and no comments? For shame, it's a good tool!

I'm not a natural user of this product and have never used any snippet tools, so I'm commenting as an outsider. But I really like several things you've done:

1. Homepage is super clean and easy to navigate, love it

2. Black/white visual style is crisp

3. I like that your components are actual rectangles, no rounded borders or shadows or fades

4. Great ergonomics to copy snipppets: just click on the code

Specific feedback:

1. The progress bar on the copied-to-clipboard popup makes sense from a "when is this thing gonna go away" point of view, but the copy (I suspect) happens instantly and my instinct is "I need to wait for the progress bar to complete" -- so you're sending a mixed message there. That's probably the biggest thing I'd change actually.

2. Your search is a bit bogus. I can relate, having also shipped a demo on HN with a very bogus search. Some tests I did: "void" and "float", which gave me unrelated snippets. Maybe an off-by-one error somewhere?

3. Font weight 100 is really light; it renders as a 1px line width on my 4k laptop screen, which is 0.08mm wide. I can read it, but I wouldn't be able to read it in daylight for example.

4. Your "copy" and "share" buttons have pretty animations that I find endearing and I think you should hate. I struggle with this: I want my things to be distinctive and pretty, and ultimately I just need to hate the fluff and get to the point with my designs. Your "copy this thing" button doesn't need character, it needs purpose -- and those two are very different. (I'm not using strong words because it matters, it's just something I struggled with and framed it this way when I wanted to change my mind. So I'm sharing that with you in case it helps.)

5. Searchable tags if I click on them? Also, "show more" just to get tags seems un-ergonomic -- but I know how it is when you're coding these things.

6. On Firefox, the keyboard shortcuts popup overflows off to the right, so some of them aren't readable.

7. If I were going to use this, I would run it on local k8s; do you have a Docker image?

8. CodeBERT embeddings + vector DB for search?

9. What's your privacy policy?

10. That "about" page ... duuuude ... it feels like you wrote the product, had a few beers, and went "you know what? THIS ONE'S FOR ME". And I fucking love it. It's transparently awful and has a great visual personality. I would totally ship it.

Overall, nice project! It's clear you know what you wanted and had opinions. And I appreciated going through it as a user because I got some valuable perspective on my own project. Hope it goes well for you!

Nope still there, but you may have caught the server at a bad moment. Because Asqi uses the DB read/write, there's only one replica of the server and it has less than 100% uptime depending on indexing and user load.

Looks like there's a grammar for it (https://github.com/fwcd/tree-sitter-kotlin) so I think it's on the table!

Awesome, OK I believe I can make that work then. Very glad you mentioned Sorbet because I hadn't heard of it before but it will be cool to have it ship with Ruby out of the gate.

For Ruby + Sorbet, it looks like Sorbet fits into Ruby syntax so we can reuse the same grammar, but you'd probably want the signatures to be considered as part of the methods. Working with the example from their website:

  sig {params(name: String).returns(Integer)}
  def main(name)
    puts "Hello, #{name}!"
    name.length
  end

I think the idea is that Asqi should treat `sig {}` sort of like a comment: prefix metadata attached to `def main`, rather than as an unrelated imperative call (whereas `attr_reader` would not have this behavior). Do you know whether Sorbet continues to work if you alias `sig` and any of its other definitions? For example, can I do this?

  def mysig(&proc)
    sig(&proc)  # or some other transformation
  end

  mysig {params(name: String).returns(Integer)}  # does this work? I hope/assume not
  def foo(name)
    name.length
  end

If the above is disallowed, then it should be easy to implement Ruby with Sorbet support built in. Otherwise I can probably do Ruby by itself, but it would be unaware of annotations attached to methods since to my knowledge there's normally no structural connection between statements that precede definitions.

Yeah the locking up is a big issue right now. It happens when you first load a repo and the client populates its local IndexedDB with all the RPC data coming down, which is 10-100k insertions and causes browser slowness. I've tried a couple of strategies that run them in timed batches to avoid overwhelming the browser, but it still has trouble especially on big repos. If you know of a way to bulk-load IDB without browser issues, let me know; my next strategy is probably just going to be either to defensively trickle-load or maybe try to measure microtask wakeup times to detect event loop load for backoff. Once I get it right I'll write a blog post about it because it's an unexpectedly challenging problem.

The good news, though, is that the load delays happen only the first time: if you let it warm up once and reload later, it should be much snappier because IDB reads are much faster than IDB writes.

The hover on click idea came up in another reply and I really like it as an option you can choose. That's going to be a high priority for the next release, I'm glad you also mentioned it.

Pre-rendering is a very good idea and while I had considered it before, your comment has me thinking about a much more general use case for it. I think it might enable some very snappy UI behavior, particularly around time-scrubbing or timelapse animations. I'm really glad you said something; this might lead to something very cool.

Thanks for the kind words and thoughtful feedback!

Hahaha "if it doesn't cause seizures, it's not really Asqi" - well we have a brand, that's for sure :) (seriously I have got to fix this soon my god)

TTE is so freaking cool, I will hate myself if this doesn't make it in somehow. And I didn't even know it existed until now, so thank you!

This is absolutely constructive feedback, thank you again for writing it all up. I'll go through point by point and share my thoughts about each one.

Re speed and compactness, thank you! These are two things I really value in UIs, and I optimized Asqi pretty relentlessly to make it fast. It's good to hear that it's appreciated and I'm glad you said something.

1. The "feature coming soon" is awful and embarrassing. It exists because I wanted to make it clear that Asqi has a strong emphasis on history -- in fact, that's fundamentally what it's about -- even though big parts of that feature-space aren't implemented yet. But it was so painful to ship that way; I hate that div so much for blocking my mouse. ...so I'm sorry to you and everyone else that you have to suffer through the existence of that panel.

2a. Circular things, which we internally call bagels, are 100% a gimmick. Ultimately their job is just to look at code top-down, and there are probably better ways to do it although I don't know of any yet. But the problem is that I can be bought (at least in UI terms), and I realized that I really liked the way code looks in concentric circles. So I had these two conflicting thoughts: "this is cool and visually anchors the product", and "this is stupid and no serious person would find it valuable."

I tried rendering diffs in bagel form, which you can see if you shift-click other branches in the history tab to get this URL: https://demo.dev.asqi.io/#fast-libgit2::main,#6818,#6819,#68...::::. So cool, we have multiway diffs rendered in tree form, and now when you hover the elements you see which branches modified each blob. But it still feels like a gimmick because I can't really conclude that it's better than a properly-executed tree view. I don't know how to properly execute a tree view enough to make me dislike the bagel holistically, but if I ever do then the bagel is out. There's plenty to dislike about it.

2b. Hover-actions are central to Asqi's design and I love them, but I'm a sloppy-focus person and that's definitely a minority preference. The flashing is awful and the epilepsy warning was comically embarrassing to have to include. I think a toggle is definitely worthwhile so people don't suffer through my ergonomic biases.

I spent a bunch of time wringing as much see-things leverage out of each screen as I could, except for the despised "feature coming soon" div discussed above, and even did some things like if you hover over a repo-local link in a markdown, scrolling on that link scrolls the link's destination so you can peek into the contents without moving your UI frame of reference. If the user had to click on stuff, they'd have a deeper navigation history and more backtracking.

Having said all that, your perspective is also entirely valid. There's a point where your preferences may diverge from Asqi's design enough that Asqi isn't for you, but I don't think it's here. Asqi needs to meet you on this one by at least providing an option.

3. We don't yet have go-to-references, and perhaps never will. We don't actually have a precise definition/reference linkage for the codebase at all because I don't know how to represent it efficiently across multiple commits. Sourcegraph does it for one revision but not for all to my knowledge (I think if you explore past commits and jump to definition, it jumps into the present, for example). In the first months of Asqi I was so bent on solving this problem that I was designing type-system compilers whose sole purpose was to emit bytecode that implemented the jump-to-definition program across different blob/tree revisions. Then I realized Asqi isn't really about that and I'm not sure that's a product. That said, I also feel the lack of go-to-references and I've been thinking about whether it's implementable. I want it to be because it's a good feature.

4. The Ctrl+K dialog is half-baked and awful. It barely works, in fact. It's supposed to autocomplete words as you type, but it doesn't; instead, it alternates between autocompletions and path completions and expects you to manage focus. It is an abysmal, abhorrent piece of garbage that is second in place only to the semantic-history placeholder div in earning my ire. And like the semantic history panel, I owe you and everyone else an apology for how badly it works. It will be improved or deleted, for everyone's sake.

As for full-text search, I don't think it's going to make it in and for an interesting reason. Asqi's search backend searches for all functions that have ever existed, not just the ones in the current revision. Right now it filters down to just current ones, but "code ghosts" -- code that once existed and is now gone -- are one of the big drivers for having a semantic search feature. So Asqi's search is less about "find stuff in text" and more about "find named entities", at least for now. If the indexes don't get too big, I may also try to add the search-text use case, because I agree it would be useful and I feel the lack of that feature pretty regularly.

5. I really love this point you make, because you're 100% right and I'm kind of an asshat for not seeing it. I wanted Asqi to come across as opinionated, with some old-school sensibilities like Emacs-style key strings because they're compact and have a certain aesthetic appeal. However, Asqi's lack of regular descriptions can be read as not just anachronistic but gatekeeping, which broadly sucks and adds no value. This is another place where Asqi needs to meet the user, not expect the user to meet it. And I never would have thought of this because old-school key strings are second-nature to me. So thank you for saying something.

6. My tabs suck. I should be using a UI library, but threw them together as an early learn-React experiment and never fixed them. Eventually I'd like to get rid of pixels dedicated to things like tabs, but haven't figured out all the details yet. So you can expect crappy UI components like that to be gone soon, and please keep complaining about them (and any others) until they are.

I'm really glad you wrote all this up. It was helpful for me to go through and think about each point you made and how Asqi relates to it. I can't promise that Asqi will become a product you like, but you've given me a lot of room to think about whether it should, and I appreciate having that option. Any thoughts you have going forward are very welcome.

You're very welcome. I wanted to build a product I would use, and being hands-off about customer data is a big part of that. (I was trying to use another code search tool and bailed because it wanted me to sign into Github just to use it locally.) So Asqi will always be designed with that sensibility, including commercial versions which also will never phone home -- licensing will be airgap-compatible.

YES - this was very much on my mind actually. I was thinking we really need section outlining for Markdown (and for diffs etc, so like "two people want to edit this paragraph" when we have collision detection later). It didn't make it into the first cut but was and still is top of mind as I'm dogfooding it.

I have had some good ideas and some stupid ideas for semantic history, and many very mixed prototypes. The simplest option, and what I'll probably go with, is just a table of commits-modifying-this-thing. But that's not all the information; for example, a linear list of commits doesn't convey branch/merge topology well. I'm not sure how useful that information is, but I'd kinda like to see it.

The data I collect is two things: first, we can do a semantic git-diff operation in the backend; and second, we search-index the diffs so you can say "which commits modify entity X" and get a fast answer. That's what the UI will do when you focus on a function.

I use off-the-shelf TS grammars and write custom queries for them. I've got a custom abstraction in the backend that lets you query for ranges of nodes at once, which is how we jump to the top of comments above a function rather than to the function definition itself.

Your back-burner project is exactly where Asqi is headed -- and in fact, the backend for this is 100% done in Asqi but the frontend doesn't show the data yet. The idea is to determine things like, "two branches modify function X in two different ways" and even if the diffs don't collide, you get to see that there's a potential semantic conflict coming up. There's some potential opportunity to use past change data to detect when a function is sensitive to multiple editors, or when it's just a big list of calls/hooks or some such where it doesn't matter so much. So in the long term, I think of it as "how important is this potentially interesting conflict scenario" as some type of user-attention number that is priority-sorted so the user sees most-important first.

(Btw, I would personally not like to hear that my pet project was being implemented by a non-free product; the silver lining here is that Asqi will always let you analyze private repos locally if you don't need to pull them automatically -- i.e. if you have local clones -- so it's probably free for what you're doing unless you're launching a SaaS product. I may also add some type of data export API later so you can use the Asqi backend to power other frontends.)

Terminal over ssh? Hahaha don't tempt me :)

I really like this idea. It's not at all what I had in mind for the product, but that's because it had never occurred to me. I'm going to give this some serious thought and see what shakes out.

Thanks so much for writing this up, it's great! Let me get some coffee and I'll share some thoughts about where we are and where it's going.

I wanted to say, this is really thoughtful comment and thank you. I love getting ideas like this about the business model and product/market fit.

The second half of the product is a lot more about everyday features e.g. "whose branches collide with mine" or "what are all the upcoming changes in this module", that type of thing. I'm hoping that shores up the long-termism a bit. We'll have to see, though; this whole thing is kind of an experiment and it may just be a miss, or serve a very specialized use case. If you have more thoughts, I'd welcome them.

Yeah you definitely don't need to install anything. I don't know how to deploy React apps apparently (will try to fix), but it's just a regular website and I would never ask users to expect anything else.

Update: it's because create-react-app creates manifest.json in public/, which causes Chrome to prompt you for this. I've deleted it in the latest container image and I'll redeploy once traffic dies down a bit.

Got it working again! Sorry about that, server crash possibly from being on HN :)

It's actually pretty straightforward; we use tree-sitter for parsing and it takes me about 2-3 hours for each language. So I'm planning to add a lot more in the near future.

If you have any that you find especially valuable, let me know and I'll see if I can prioritize them.

Hi, thanks for trying it out! The server crashed, sorry about that. I need to add a liveness check. It should be working now.

As for comments asking to install React, it's a bug on my end. Create-react-app leaves a manifest.json file in public/, which causes the prompt to appear. I've deleted it in the latest container image but haven't redeployed yet since we've got a lot of active users at the moment.

Anyway, you don't have to install anything, nor will you ever have to, in order to use Asqi.