Mitchell Hashimoto Launches Superlogical to Unify Developer Workflows
Mitchellh starts a new company: Superlogical
We are building a durable session layer that unifies interactive, automatic, and production work into a single system. Starting with a modern terminal multiplexer, our goal is to solve the fragmentation caused by separate tools for development and operations. This approach ensures that context is preserved across environments while remaining visible and controllable by humans.
AI makes this fragmentation more visible and costly, but it did not create it.
- simonw
I really like the bit where he transferred ownership of Ghostty to a non-profit, and is now building this new company on that as an open source dependency:
> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.
- brandall10
This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately...
- pi-web (https://pi-web.dev/): a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines
- herdr (https://herdr.dev/): a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI, can easily spawn or destroy windows based on subagent activity
- firstmate (https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate): a meta environment for coding harnesses - more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, managing worktrees, and other SDLC functions, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models
- danbruc
This reminds me somewhat of OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, ... [1]. You can paste an Excel chart into a Word document and if you update the data in Excel, the chart in Word will update. You can edit the chart in Word using the Excel UI because you are essentially running an Excel instance inside of Word. You can interact with Excel through an API, no need for a human. But it is painful, you can probably imagine the kind of API you need in order to be able to do all the things you can do with the Excel UI.
The idea is amazing, making this work consistently requires effort, and a lot of it. And as only a few applications invested this effort, it only works with a few applications and never really took off outside of Microsoft. I think this used to work with WordPad and maybe even Notepad but it no longer does, you just get an image instead of the chart object in WordPad and nothing at all in Notepad. It is a dying technology.
- rixed
Meta, won't comment on the site, won't click. I'm fed up with this category of click baity titles that are designed to be enigmatic rather than informative.
The guideline do not mention this, apart maybe from:
If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
I'd prefer HN if we made it a habit to editorialize such titles consisting solely of a Domainname or a single word.
- devy
Wow, that "We're hiring/Career Page" link is geeksmaxxing.
First time seeing `ssh superlogical.jobs` would be a way to show job descriptions in terminal!
- sigbottle
I feel like the main benefit of such a thing would be centralization. Part of the issue with the terminal ecosystem is precisely that everything's so fragmented and everybody needs to support arcane terminal protocols and wrap a billion wrappers around each other. The easiest way to solve this is to be a definer yourself rather than an integrator, which I think is what this is trying to be. If we could actually have standardized terminal extensions in one place (you'd be surprised how many extension codes there are in terminal land) that has a different semantics not from the 80s, but still captures the terminal experience, that would be great.
The 'cleanest' experience I've got for what I want is mosh + tmux and even that has issues (no block cursor for example).
If superlogical's ultimate goal is to revamp the Linux developer ecosystem, all for it. Am potentially worried long term about these kinds of strategies from a political point of view but as long as things stay open source and stay as local dev tools, its fine.
- ksec
Flashback to when Mitchell first introduce Vagrant [1] to HN, which of course was the how everything from HashiCorp started.
I thought it was't that long ago, may be 8, or at best 10-12 years.
Turns out 16 years has passed.
Curious if it would be another project using Zig.
- alasano
They're basically building in one layer what a lot of people are using multiple different apps for currently. Exactly as another commenter said, it's sort of a mix between herdr and proper remote access.
I use pi as my primary harness and then Claude code and Codex (but with the desktop app for some very specific things)
The last two have remote capability with their own app. With pi, you have extensions that can do remote access, but you still end up with three different places to look to get remote access properly from your phone.
People also use tmux and Zellij and any other number of combinations of different apps combined with some kind of remote access, but nothing that's unified and does everything all at once in one place. I feel like that's a good problem to solve if you can do it better.
It doesn't solve the fundamental problem however of inverting the flow from one human to many agents to many agents to one agent to one human.
- pjs_
I've spend the last ~20 years inside tmux/vim — and the last month almost exclusively in the Codex desktop app, and increasingly am just doing remote control from the ChatGPT app on my phone.
Ghostty rocks and it brings me no pleasure to say this, but it seems unclear how much longer this world will exist?
- 4lx87
Agent orchestrators are the IDE dream repackaged. IDEs never really took off, excepting lock-in/monolopolization (Visual Studio, Xcode). They never lived up to the grand vision of the likes of Alan Kay. IDEs of today are still basically just text editors with a file explorer. Agent orchestrators seem similar. The vision is grand but the implementation is just tabbed terminals.