Prospero: A New Coding Harness for a More Civilized Age
A Hacker News submission points to a nullprogram.com blog post introducing Prospero, described as a new coding harness built for a more civilized age. The linked page could not be fetched, so the discussion thread is the available source; the post drew modest early attention from the community.
Prospero: A new coding harness for a more civilized age
- nico
Nitpicks about CLI coding agents:
Many times, while they are doing something, I’ll be typing a prompt, and then all of a sudden I get a question with Y/N options, and by accident, I’ll type Y/N as part of a word thus “answering the question”, many times either steering in the wrong direction or stopping the agent
Neither Claude code nor Codex solve this. The only way I’ve found to prevent it is to type somewhere else and then paste, but it’s super annoying
Also, when I want two agents in different sessions to talk to each other, it’s kinda janky, I have to talk to both and act as a messenger for a couple of turns before they properly coordinate. I wish I could just sort of click somewhere, and link unlink two or more sessions
Does Próspero solve the things above?
Any pans for “swarm”/group control of agents?
- brainless
Nice to see a gui coding agent. I use tui agents all the time but I am building a gui one. I use Claude Code, Codex, opencode and a couple other but I do not like the DX/UX.
I often want click a part of the wall of text (from agent) and search for related text, open them up on the side or so. I want to open a linked file. I want to answer multiple questions in an async manner, even come back and continue answering the next day.
There are many prompt level features I want too - orchestrate with subagents, but only the tasks I select - how do I select when there is no checkbox. Or maybe delegate a subagent to dig into (read only) one portion of the chat response. Maybe codify (write) only one task in a list of tasks. So many many other small things.
As a full-time user of coding agents, the TUI barely works for me. I think splitting text, searching in text, merging text are more important in agent driven development than ever before. It is all text, all the way. This is what I am building myself, with my own gui framework.
- bigbuppo
I'm tired of tech people forgetting to see if something else is using a name: http://www.prospero.org/
Way to cause confusion.
This is like starting a new country and calling it France.
- julesrms
Great to see what you're doing there, but speaking as a 30-year hardcore C++ veteran (to the extent of creating my own C++ GUI framework: https://juce.com)... When I was writing a code agent (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler), there's no way I'd have used C++ for an agent GUI!
Agent UIs are all markdown, HTML, big scrolling lists, text flow, unicode chars, and all the other stuff that C++ frameworks are terrible at, but which is a doddle in HTML/CSS/JS.. You are a brave man!
- indigodaddy
Does this support local sandboxing/isolation of the app/environment you are working on? If not I'd imagine one could figure out how to make that sort of thing work with Prospero in any case or?
- keyle
Many make their own harness today anyway...
I did mine as well and that takes 4% the resources of opencode and in a similar tui style.
I think it's great and everyone should make their own.
- x3haloed
OK, I like this in concept a LOT. I especially like that it's efficient and headless with an attachable GUI.
But I don't like how opinionated it is: "Therefore Prospero prime design principle: Never wait forever. Every operation has a deadline. This decision influences everything."
I respect that opinion, but I don't share it, and therefore an entire coding harness developed around that opinion is not helpful for me.
- bensyverson
There are so many cool harnesses I could use if I didn't have an outrageously subsidized Claude subscription