Hacker News: rickyvetter

New comment by rickyvetter in "Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance"

rickyvetter — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:02:49 +0000

TUIs have this really nice attribute of running local to the data you care about (web apps have a lot of complicated glue code required to do interesting things), and in a UI that is incredibly simple to test and iterate on because the output can be serialized to a text file with very minimal loss of fidelity.

It is hard to remove the rise of agentic flows and LLMs generally from this discussion. The fact that LLMs understand text in a first-class way and have had more time to get good at them, means that they can iterate and build apps and features that might bog down a model in the context of a GUI app and all of the additional context required for the larger framework and deployment and testing story.

These attributes and the current environment with LLMs mean that it's really easy to build ephemeral UIs that serve a purpose right now, and then consider productionizing or generalizing at a later date. If you decide to do this, you have the really high fidelity tests that make it easier.

New comment by rickyvetter in "Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance"

rickyvetter — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:34:27 +0000

I work on bonsai_term (though Jose is the primary author and many others have contributed incredible work). I'm happy to try and answer any questions that the post may bring up.

New comment by rickyvetter in "Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance"

rickyvetter — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:27:51 +0000

The whole UI seems better for LLMs to consume and also displays nicely in-editor for humans. Test failures become failing screenshot tests essentially, which are really comfortable changes to review.

New comment by rickyvetter in "Reason React 0.8"

rickyvetter — Wed, 13 May 2020 23:07:47 +0000

I'm not OP but I work on ReasonReact. I think these are excellent questions - thanks for asking despite your worries about tone.

1. I would not classify this release as huge by most definitions, but I do think it is by a couple. First - it has many more contributors (both in code and on issues) than the 0.7 release and that means better reflection of community desires and direction. Second - it is the first release that forces 7.x BuckleScript which sets up ReasonReact for optimizations that would be impossible otherwise. Better support for `lazy`, `context`, and more.

2. BuckleScript is a true fork of OCaml and that comes with tradeoffs. On the plus you get JS interop you cannot achieve with JSOO (records and modules compiling to objects, https://bucklescript.github.io/blog/2020/03/26/generalize-un...). On the downside, active effort must be made and prioritized to upstream and maintain course with OCaml proper.

2a. Reason is being used in production at Facebook today, but Facebook also employs many of the people working on it. I personally consider it to be in a stable state for production use, but same as any technology I think it would be foolish to adopt Reason without better understanding the reason it exists, the problems it's trying to solve, and the drawbacks it has.

New comment by rickyvetter in "Rebuilding our tech stack for the new facebook.com"

rickyvetter — Fri, 08 May 2020 19:56:53 +0000

Hey - maintainer of ReasonReact here. We don't believe in mandating the tools that people use and there are plenty of good reasons to use TS, Flow, PureScript, Rust, etc. Folks on the Messenger Web team in Facebook like Reason as their language of choice. Reason is used heavily on Messaging code in the old facebook.com and in this rebuilt version.

The rebuilding of facebook.com was done quickly and involves almost every web team at Facebook. Almost all of these folks are familiar with Flow and only some are familiar with Reason. Asking every engineer at FB to learn Reason at the same time in addition to the already massive number of new things would have been adding unnecessary risk to this already incredibly risky project.

New comment by rickyvetter in "Run Your Own Website"

rickyvetter — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 14:31:42 +0000

Here's an example of a site that is doing something like this - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html

Staying Lean – Keeping Clean Code

rickyvetter — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 14:51:46 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/social-tables-tech/staying-lean-keeping-clean-code-f6d639f579a5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8108503

Points: 3

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