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.
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
I've been working on collie[1] a plugin for herdr that runs a web app on the herdr host which can then be served via tailscale for example. This has made accessing my agents on the go a lot easier, paired with session persistence from herdr it's been quite nice to work with.
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!
The ssh thing is really fun, but I wish they had another way to view the openings. I'm on a connection with massive latency at the moment and it's pretty horrible UX in this case
NSA and other companies historically had you jumping hoops and writing mini-exploits to be able to see the email you're supposed to send your resume to.
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.
Right, but I'm pretty sure this is not the first time somebody thought about solving it.
> We're also addressing the most common papercuts of existing tools, such as making scrollback, selection, and scrolling all work natively.
Goes ahead and butchers the browser scrollbar.
Scrollbar is fine for me? Just styled
Invisible until moused over, or scrolled by other means. Barely visible even then. In the wrong place. It may be "just styled", but it's certainly not fine.
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.
Without clicking you’d never know why it’s the title.
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.
Considering it's going to consume libghostty, I'm betting it'll be Zig.
The application layer is in Swift at least.
libghostty exports a C ABI. For an application from Mitch at this layer I would guess Go.
Mitch said he doesn't like go since they added generics.
I checked the available jobs and they are hiring Typescript for web, Go for infrastructure,systems, Objective-C, swift for Apple
I dig the ssh jobs page, UX is very good.
They hire for Go.
OT, but the superlogical browser tab icon gives me flashbacks (pun intended) to the flash player icon:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Adobe_Fl...
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.
I think IDEs took off plenty well, but several got frozen in time.
Visual Studio as the IDE for building windows client apps, especially WinForms, was and still is a genuinely incredible and productive experience. The ease of which you could click-and-drag a UI, context switch to logic in the code behind the forms, wire up a web service backend, share domain models and have navigation and search tools understand all of it was great. And the TFS integration was quite good too. You really only had to leave VS to do database work or administer some IIS pools.
Unfortunately, it couldn't keep up with the rest of the dev world. "Server Explorer" morphed to include your Azure VMs but froze for 30s each time you opened it. Docker tools came in super late, most Azure services didn't really have a VS tooling experience. The "right click publish" workflow meant for small systems never figured out how to graduate to real-world needs across many teams. Developers had to learn how to use many other tools for modern stuff, and so VS became far less of a center of gravity, often to their annoyance.
I think they definitely have the IDE vision in mind and are trying to move off of terminals, based on two parts of the original article
> so you can close the application, reconnect from another device, and pick up exactly where you left off.
I think this is the remote IDE development dream that no one could quite get right, partly because there wasn't enough reason to run things on a 24/7 device. I think with coding agents that can run in the background this changes.
> Sessions can be accessed through the web and native macOS/iOS applications, and sharing a live session with other people is built in from the start.
I'd really like to point out that "Sharing a live session" is horrible UX for a terminal multiplexer because the terminal has to be the same size (# of rows/cols) on all viewers' screens, and some of these viewers may be on a phone and others on a laptop. Believe it, I tried myself and there's no good way around the problem.
What is interesting is that they added this sentence anyway. This tells me that their long-term endgame is not the terminal. They're most likely trying to build a GUI-based agent IDE and then eventually expand to other work (per their headline of being the "multiplexer for all work") as it all gets more and more agent-based anyways. Well, they're not alone in having that vision.
Do you think the future is more sophisticated agent management, or will tooling increasingly fall away to a single chat session with an executive agent of sorts?
I expect the product from this company to resemble a combination of Orca + zmx
[0]: https://github.com/stablyai/orca [1]: https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx
Somewhat related, I recently heard of fentas/atty from:
If its got Mitchell, I’m in.
To make it more relevant: right now I mostly rely on tmux. Before that I’ve been a long time user of screen (irssi over ssh people know this play). Looking forward to this.
If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out.
Yep, a lot of toxic investors in this. Not touching it with a ten foot pole and lost a lot of respect for Mitchell. A couple of the other investors:
* https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031
* https://x.com/search?q=from:lennypruss%20israel&src=typed_qu...
Yuck.
These comments are absurd about their investors. I’m sure if their investor list included socialist nobody on HN would bat an eye. Ahh that’s right, socialist are “takers” not “makers”. Age old standing on the pedestal of moral superiority.
why are you bringing your socialist boogeymen into this. what's absurd is that this is somehow louder for you than the real, life-changing actions of the genocidal maniac.
Being pro-genocide is orthogonal to political ideology.
VCs tend to be a toxic bunch. Hard to avoid that in our business
in this case mitchell is an exited founder with a net worth of over $1B so he can be choosier than almost anyone in this regard. Deeply disappointing he is taking money from Guillermo
things look different from Billionaire Island than they do to us plebs down here. it's crazy to expect such people to do the "right" thing, they're too far gone.
more info please!
He thinks ability to vote (and the number of votes you get) should be based on income.
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/business/article/shopify-...
I may be going astray, but I can see a way to degenerate "taxes paid" to "taxes before deductions" to "income since it relates to taxes anyways"
Not the most important(IMO) of our founding fathers, Thomas Paine.
That would be true if he advocated for votes according to effective taxation rate or something similar. He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember, which is a rounding error to his income class.
Instead, he makes sure to include the idea of stripping low-income people of all voting rights.
Why would they care? The ultra-wealthy impact election through donations, which is many order of magnitudes more impactful than their personal ballot, even if you were to give them 10x weight. Elon Musk impact on the U.S. election wasn't because he drove to the booth.
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I found this just when I googled his name plus controversy
> Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke faced fierce online backlash in July 2026 after endorsing a social media proposal for a tax-tiered voting system that would strip voting rights from non-taxpayers and give multiple votes to high-income earners.
but if we go as far as to say
> If it’s touched by Tobias Lütke, I’m out.
does it mean control or sponsored, for example ladybird web browser...
It is a good thing you can use Google chrome instead which has zero contributors with stances you disagree with... I guess.
That vague posting is a bit frustrating to be honest.
Are you talking about the fact they do not accept pull requests? If yes, they had good reasons for doing so, LLMs make it really time consuming and exhausting to manage an open source community, I completely understand why they decided to stop accepting PRs for now
Ok, what is the new drama this time around?
https://fortune.com/2026/07/27/shopify-ceo-voting-rights-str...
Along with a myriad of different controversies. Just searching his name will bring up many articles about his chronically online Elon Musk wannabe takes.
He came to Canada as an immigrant, made some buck and now unashamedly calls 'idiots' the very people that built the communities where he lives. The guy is a complete POS.
Some people believe that anyone who does not maintain 100% ideological purity and goodness, which can be measured by if they align 100% with the persons own and therefore morally good political ideas, which also coincidentally matches the status quo of Brooklyn based journalists, that the heretic must be ostracized from all of society and it is impossible to work with them. Since Tobi Lutke made a mortal sin of disagreeing on suffrage requirements, they should be cast into fire and ostracized.
I don't think "citizens have a right to vote" is anywhere near the realm of ideological purity or "Brooklyn based journalist" thinking. It's literally just democracy.
Freedom of speech seems like something Lutke would pretend to like, and him getting torched for his anti-human opinions is a great demonstration of that principle.
> Lutke made a mortal sin of disagreeing on suffrage requirements
I think this is a very tame and apologetic and dishonest way to put it. Suffrage and voting is how people have a voice in the future of their democracy. He advocates for a policy that materially removes that right, that say in the future, from those who already have little power. I don’t know how else to emphasize that it’s more than “they disagree a bit with him and now he’s an impure sinner”, it’s more akin to “this rich dude wants to rewrite the rules to give himself more power and us less”, which is a sober assessment of his policy. I think people actively trying to avoid giving him any more money or power is a very understandable reaction to that
I think ultimately some parts of ideology are bound to and by the reality we live in, and acknowledging that reality gives a good answer here for when _it seems like_ people freaking out at an “impure idea” - is there a documented harm that we can look at?
Many people boycott Elon and his products. Do you raise this same “moral purity” complaint about them? Does it ever go in the other direction?
I think technology and how we build it is deeply tied to us as social, communal beings. Tech can be a reflection of our capabilities, our values. Tech shapes our reality in turn. It’s worth thinking about, being critical of, and believing people when they say what they believe
No, this is "omnicause" / "intersectionality" type thinking.
> Location Though the team has spent many years scaling remote-first companies and is currently remote, we are hiring specifically in Los Angeles, London, and New York, with an expectation for a flexible in-office schedule as we build our presence in each region.
I always get a "lifestyle business" vibe when tech companies are based in LA or NY. When you're a seasoned veteran you'd prefer to live in a larger, more fun city, even though tech is concentrated in the Bay Area
Or you want to hire the kind of seasoned veterans who want to live in those cities. Often later-career, families, looking for exposure to more than just a thriving tech scene.
And salaries are lower than SF.
Like notable lifestyle businesses Datadog, Squarespace, Etsy, Tinder, and Snap.
Its interesting they recognize they've themselves worked remotely for most of their careers but not for our new company. Maybe its a new trend
I don’t think that’s a parsimonious explanation in a post-COVID world. It seems equally if not more likely that talent is more distributed, and people find fewer reasons to relocate into the Bay Area (in terms of career progression, etc.)
(This is not, in my mind, either a good or a bad thing.)
What do you mean by lifestyle business?
A business that lets employees have a healthy work-life balance.
Thanks, it’s a bit concerning that’s not considered the default
Ah ok, in that case Superlogical doesn’t sound like a lifestyle business given the number of VCs involved
Generally I think lifestyle business means a business that is going to make the owners a comfortable living but not likely to make anyone filthy-rich.
In silicon valley/tech it's sometimes treated as a derogatory term.
This doesn't seem like a niche that isn't filled. Am I missing out on something by still just using iTerm2 and tmux?
You are missing out a bit, but stay content. :)
Multiplexers have a lot of little papercuts and limitations when you want consistent and native-to-the-OS behavior to flow all the way between the OS and the apps and connections in the multiplexers. For example, gesture scrolling in a tmux/zellij pane is hard because the right events don't flow through. It's a similar itch to scratch in designing a good terminal lib (like ghostty.)
And then, there's all the unifying and smoothing out of data connections--I imagine they'll be a lot to make sure that, e.g., an ssh session or a Claude code session in a pane can be seamlessly reconnected or never drop when the pane is closed. This takes a lot of hacking to make look seamless in most setups right now.
Like mitchell, I write a lot of software around multiplexers, and I've thought about making something similar, but I don't have quite the same level of personal wealth or angel investor connections. :)
herdr and mosh are a couple of reference points for this, there are others.
I've wondered this myself. I stuck with iTerm2 for a really long time but recently switched to Ghostty. Ghostty definitely seems to renders faster (I say "seems to" because I didn't benchmark or anything).
I don't actually use a multiplexer. I'm not sure I understand the use case when most terminal emulators supports tabs + windows (like iTerm2 does). Or you could just launch multiple windows and use your OS's window manager to "multiplex". Are the terminals connected in some way that I'm missing?
Regardless, I think Ghostty is a reminder that you can win in a space that's crowded. There's probably a lot of widely used software that would get dropped en masse immediately if someone had the guts to make a better alternative.
Typically, the benefit of the mux over just more windows or tabs is the ability to detach sessions from a term and have them continue to run. But yea, the “split a term window into multiple terms” doesn’t have quite as much value in a world of lots of tabs. That said, you can do it under program control on the remote host, so it does save remote login overhead, etc. But for local, less value.
I imagine something more like herdr, but done at the terminal level, not inside. But that’s cmux…
If you like terminals and tmux, can I suggest you spend a few hours playing with herdr? It clicked for me in a way that a lot of other orchestrators didn't.
Really exciting IMO. Many people are working on new work interfaces (e.g. Codex/Claude/Cursor, multiplayer agent spaces, unified Slack/Notion/Zoom, etc.), and I think the Superlogical vision makes sense as a competitor in the space, at least to try.
There’s clearly room to improve our existing tools.
I love how ghostty does windows/tabs/splits, but ultimately, I don't find myself using them. I find that I only have so much muscle memory in my hands, and I need to stick with one solution that works everywhere. A multiplexer let's me do this on my own machine, or if I'm SSH'd in elsewhere. Personally I use Zellij, because tmux feels like learning another vim. But I do use tmux when using tmate, because it's the simplest way I've found to share terminals.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see someone with Michell's talent entering this space. We can use more options with sane defaults and great performance.
The biggest strength to Tmux that a lot of the alternatives lack is you could make a shell script to setup your tmux instance(s) exactly as you would want, so by the time you load into it, its got all the tabs, split terminals, etc where you want them.
Im assuming that they've noticed tools like CMUX and Herdr (cmux is using libghostty too and i use herdr in ghostty) and this is gonna be similar?
Maybe I just missed the boat on hashicorp and similar solutioning, but I find a lot of the solutions for working with multiple systems using an intermediary shared language, such as terraform, end up obfuscating the problems they intend to solve and result in people who deal with and support those systems on a daily basis having very little understanding of how to interact and troubleshoot the core infra that is being built up with those tools.
Yes, building those solutions requires a lot of expertise, but I've never found the tools to be worth engaging with over just using what the standard platform tools they abstract away were replacing. Then you add in the economic rug-pull scenarios that have happened when utilizing software like this and I wonder why everyone hops on the bandwagon so easily.
What is the company they're building trying to solve that system maintainers can't already do? Isn't this just rebuilding OS windowing?
At the risk of sounding like a booster, I have noodled over whether this is a place that AI can legitimately provide some improvements. It's harder than just waving an AI at the problem, which is why we don't really have this yet. But one of the major issues with the intermediary language you're talking about is the rigidity of conventionally-applied programming. AI is a bit more flexible and gooey and more able to function as duct tape and bailing wire... but that does come with several tradeoffs of its own that need to be mitigated to some degree.
As a specific example of this, I've been using emacs since about 1997, but it's only this year that I've started down this sort of "integrate everything" road that it promises, because I've never wanted to learn emacs' specific Lisp variant that is used nowhere else. But now with AI I've done more emacs extensions that are providing real value to me than I have in the last... ever. About my previous limit was reifying a keyboard macro into a command, which still isn't really programming emacs.
The ability to indicate "intent" in a way that computers can actually process it as "intent" might change the calculus enough to make this more possible than it used to be in the past.
But those tradeoffs are real. Non-determinism is a problem. Difficulty in knowing what the AI is doing unless you're staring at its output, and even the ability to conceivably monitor an AI's output is only a transient thing we have at the moment, they'll speed up past our ability to monitor them at all soon enough. But it's at least a new area that can be explored and there may be solutions to some problems in there we couldn't reach before.
Looking really cynically, it does seem like it might transition into some kind of cloud-development situation. Your "one access to all development" is one ssh away from our mega 24/7 online compute farm, since we need to keep the sessions persistent. But you can access anything you want!
Hopefully that's not the endgame?
There is value in abstracting the underlying generic systems into more context-relevant primitives for people who just want to get shit done in that context.
Why not meet people where they are at?
If this product isn't valuable, then it will fail. I suspect it will not fail.
I dig that the jobs page is via ssh!
Funny. I started working on a similar product myself just a few days ago. I have multiple machines for multiple different purposes. Each one runs different agents (some local, some cloud), for different tasks. Different ones store different data (a NAS on one, my VMs on another, etc.). I wanted a durable layer over all of them to be able to start work on any one of them and resume on any other, and for all the disparate agents to share memory/configurations where possible, and for each node in the network to make all the others aware of its purpose (so when the NAS is online, the agents know how to connect to it and what it contains). Sadly no VC funding for me, building it on my lonesome :)
Sounds super interesting!
What's your approach?
Still exploring different options but at the moment I run a daemon on each node that connects via iroh to link the nodes (and NAT traversal). Once the link is established the nodes share data via a Raft-based datastore. I can launch a TUI client on any machine. This presents a chat interface like a typical LLM harness. From here I can configure which model I want to use, how the model is executed and on which node (for example I can use Ollama on machine A to serve a model that’s running on machine B, but executing commands via this system on machine C). Each daemon then acts like a typical LLM harness, but headless. So the commands and tool calls are streamed into the shared store and finally end up in my TUI. Since all the state is in the distributed store I can pick up the progress wherever I want, as long as there’s a node running there.
Still a lot of big problems like latency so I’m not too happy with the current design. It’s a LOT of state to replicate, and obviously things get problematic when an agent was working on a project on machine A but then ends up on machine B which doesn’t have that project directory around at all. So the agent needs to re-orient itself to figure out what happened. Still pretty fun to play with.
why you want to build new terminal multiplexer? Is there issues with current? tmux or zellij?
Still very interested. Especially if you will go further than terminal - multiplexer for window environment, not just in terminal
This is an incredible idea. I would usually be skeptical that such an engineering-focused tool would "make it," but Mitchell Hashimoto is one of the very few people I think can pull it off.
This is going to change so many things if it starts getting adopted.
My understanding: it’s like tmux but the session lives on a server instead of one machine and you can open it on your computer/phone/etc
That explains why he built sessions into libghostty instead of Ghostty itself. Looking forward to it.
I spend most of my time in the terminal and have been using tmux to manage my sessions and workspaces, mainly via sesh.
But recently, I decided to move to Kitty and use its built-in sessions instead. I built something around it as well. It’s still early, but I’m really liking this workflow so far.
might be a related sneak peek here: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2079327969416482859
can't wait for more details!
`ssh superlogical.jobs` gives me same vibe as telnet bbs when I was in college :)
I love Ghostty. But I miss out on lots of its features because I use zellij exclusively to work with agents. This sounds exciting and I hope they'll choose some cliff oss license like gitbutler does
Extremely excited for this as a tmux and Ghostty user. Given the team, I know a great deal of care will be taken in building this product.
Commercializing and integrating (openclawing ?) cmux to take all the jerbs?
> We believe the missing layer is a durable session around the work itself
Curious as to how this will be different than K8s?
I'm curious from the other direction; where do you see overlap between k8s and what's described on the Superlogical website?
Doesn't K8s already practically provide a layer of abstraction across all infrastructure? You might not think of it as being a session, but to the degree that it's responsible for managing scaling and failover, it kind of is.
This isn't a statement of value, I'm genuinely curious myself. In fact, I bet this new thing will probably be better.
> For us, that means interactive work, automatic work, and production work would share one well-crafted underlying system instead of living in separate tools.
Unless this is only for the narrow band of purely local work, I would be surprised if k8s didn't play a big role in the backend solution. It is the standard "well-crafted underlying system" for automatic production work. But, it isn't strong in the interactive-work/frontend aspect or other aspects, so it certainly wouldn't be the main focus of the final product.
Random example: you want to multiplex some work across multiple (self-hosted) agents, using niche fine-tuned models. It would make good sense if those agents were automatically provisioned and deprovisioned (and isolated to your subtenant), and k8s is a great underlying system for that sort of thing.
This sounds awesome enough to see if they're hiring, and they are, but unfortunately only in certain areas with an expectation to be in-office with some regularity. Bummer. Exciting to see this team together, though. This is a tool that I want and think about daily.
This but software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergroup_(music)
is this the same thing as/related to https://superb.systems/ ?
https://go.superlogical.com --> https://superb.systems/
edit: aand someone fixed it :) I guess that must've been their older branding (it was a very beautiful website)
Very cool to see a man execute on his vision. Ghostty -> libghostty -> terminal multiplexing -> ???
It’s interesting because in an ideal world he is practically building a NixOS config.
I’m pretty new to NixOS (a few months) but i could envision using Nix to declarativey configure tmux windows and panes in a dev shell. That said, Nix feels like it might still be too clunky at this point in time to quickly re-declare window and panel arrangements. But I never tried and it could be possible.
Congrats. Not entirely clear on the vision but most things he touches are great so am sure whatever they come out with will be good stuff.
Kind of funny that he lists himself as "Creator of Ghostty" first and not Hashicorp.
Funded by Mario Zechner (pi.dev) among others.
So, at least 2 of some dudes.
Literally everything Mitchell does is top notch. Looking forward to seeing how this turns out!
"Why is terminal usage more widespread than ever?" - I guess because of AI agents?
call me an optimist, but I believe that more and more things are getting more viable to do from the terminal. tools like jj remove the need in Git GUI because mental model and UX gets streamlined, and the AI craze incentivizes practically every company to create their own CLI
So excited to see what this dream team cooks!
ssh superlogical.jobs
This actually works!
domain could be very good for some relevant AI startup and not multiplexer..
I am guessing Ghosty will become closer to Warp.
The post itself says that the effort is independent of ghostty. Their first work will utilize libghostty, and they'll contribute upstream.
In other words, this probably won't directly involve changes to ghostty.
the careers page is just `ssh superlogical.jobs` which is kinda cool
We're a team that has spent our entire careers building some of the most widely used developer tooling, infrastructure software, and AI systems.
Not being snarky. What AI systems have they built?
One of the cofounders is formerly from poolside (poolside.ai), where they produce open-weight coding models. One of their recent models, Laguna, got quite a bit of attention here on HN.
The one they’re currently building. This has to be an agent orchestration and management play.
> We will build a high-quality terminal multiplexer that remains excellent at that job, even as it grows to support the second and third parts of the plan.
why this feels the next step is data collection and Ads?
i just have log.md that keeps a running log of things as i work though a project. thats all my claude code needs to navigate 'session' across systems.
"Any sufficiently VC-funded AI startup will inevitably try to re-invent a log.md file" - Spongebob Squarepants
Taking VC money to being a better (probably worse) tmux is the sort of clownworld stuff only people in the Thiel circle can come up with
I have a lot of respect for Mitchellh but taking VC money for a tmux clone is wild.
As long as you are rich all the VCs will throw money at you.. fine.. but if you are rich then you don't have to take the VC money either. Just do it out of passion.
What does tmux alone do way better than the newer tools?
Surely the opposite question makes more sense: what's the value add of newer tools?
I will admit that I've used https://herdr.dev/ before because unlike tmux, it displays the status of running LLM agents.
another IDE for AI harnesess?
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I'm sorry to take it out on this specific announcement, as it just seems to be one of many "offenders", but why are the 15 investors listed on an announcement blog post of a semi-stealth startup?
With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not. What happened to the good old way of figuring out product market fit first? Is that the only way a product can succeed nowadays, or why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
---
I'm excited to see what Superlogical will build, but the startup scene seems to grow more clique-y by the day.
"With most of them being VC or high-count angel investors, they can combined push whatever product is being built here into 200+ companies independent of whether it is good or not"
Ah, I see you have figured it out the thing that has always been the case.
I don't doubt that, but that phenomenon seems to be reaching egregious levels.
You are commenting that on a website where this is part of the value proposition since the early days, so I wouldn't say that's a new phenomenon.
> why else would a ~billionaire that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
Investors can be good for funding but they can also be good for education. Later, they're also very good for strategy.
> What happened to the good old way of figuring out product market fit first? Is that the only way a product can succeed nowadays
Generally it's very challenging. I have two products I'm building this way and you face a lot of up-hill climb where people with VC backing are getting the door opened for them. Of course, because of those same pressures to deliver and succeed, it's equally possible those same doors will eventually get closed on them.
I think Mitchell also lives in a bit of a bubble now. He went from friendly open source guy to very rich friendly open source guy. That's no knock on him, but I would consider viewing business from the perspective of someone who has been a CEO, CTO, and IC at the same company (his company) as his only job who became insanely wealthy as a result. I have a friend who has largely only worked in big tech, and successful startups, who tells me all the time level and salary don't matter to him. They don't matter to him because he found success early. Again, not a knock but sustained success will shape how you view the world and how you play the game.
I think the generous take would be...
- it demonstrates they have funding (pre-empting "no-one will fund something weird like this")
- its transparent and open (pre-empting "which bastards are the ones who really own it?")
> why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early?
Something something "never spend your own money if you can spend someone else's money." That plus the perception of having those specific investors gives the idea/business fast authority/prestige.
It's not the gangster move, but it's a move.
> I'm excited to see what Superlogical will build, but the startup scene seems to grow more clique-y by the day.
Insert "It always was" meme
> why else would a ~billionair that could easily fund it himself pull in that many investors that early
That was my question, too. Does Mitchell even need to take outside funding? I get why you would prefer to use others' poker chips instead of your own, especially if they're happy to give them to you, but usually funding comes with strings attached.
Of course they need VC money! How else are they gonna hire the worlds best vibe coders?
It's really awkward when you consider projects like Bun, which were VC funded, and ultimately bought out by a large company, what would they have even done to pay back the VCs that funded them?
Ghostty and libghostty was product market fit.
Superlogical (allegedly) uses it for the multiplexer.
Mitchell Hashimoto is just the icing on the cake and he has a track record of building defining dev tools used by millions of devs.
So it makes sense why you see 15 angel investors.
More money / investment in the dev tool space is great for everyone!
I'm not doubting that Mitchell Hashimoto is capable of building great products with great product market fit. Quite the opposite, as the few strands of idolization that exist within me rank him as one of the best to ever do it in the dev tooling space.
I'm also not doubting that there would be tons of investors throwing themselves at him for a new venture like this.
But why, apart from forced market access would it be in his interest to take that money, given that he can nicely fund it for a few years with ~1% of his net worth if not for forced market access?
I seriously doubt it is for the money.
It said they are funded, but it doesn't mean they lost control or have to be VC hyper growth. Apart from Notable Capital and Amplify Partners all others are individuals. There are lots of benefits having these group of company founders and CEO as investors. They are likely interested in the problem space as well.
Had it been hyper growth startup you would be looking at a16z or other bigger names.
1. Accountability - even very talented people can lose motivation or get distracted. Having investors to report to helps with this.
2. Recruiting - many people would be wary of working on a rich guy's pet project. Taking investment makes it more of a real company that has to deliver something and is not subject solely to the whims of one person.
yes, dev tooling investment has always been disappointing. Mainly due to stingy buyers.
I really wish mitchellh wouldn't take funding from some of these people. Tobias Lutke in particular has chronically been on the wrong side of fundamental issues, and has most recently advocated for a pay-to-play version of democracy where wealth determines your ability to participate (and in particular your "stake" in the democracy).
> Tobias Lutke in particular has chronically been on the wrong side of fundamental issues
Just because someone has different ideas about what policies would produce better outcomes for society doesn't mean they are a malicious person.
Clearly there is a lot wrong with society and many suspect it's due to structural problems in how society is organized. Even if he's wrong, it's not surprising at all that a successful well-intentioned person who pays a lot in taxes who is otherwise not experienced in policy would have the opinion that the votes of people who pay more in taxes should have a greater weight.
There is no civilization if it's the norm to assume that someone is acting in bad faith if he has opinions different than yours. E.g. Wikipedia would have fallen apart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith
I'm sure the people who would have their right to vote stripped from them would consider that malicious, and they would be correct. That's not democracy.
> I'm sure the people who would have their right to vote stripped from them would consider that malicious, and they would be correct.
I don't agree with him but you're incorrect here. To play devil's advocate, if his policy idea resulted in better outcomes for them, e.g. better material conditions, then they may end up preferring not having a right to vote and consider him a good person.
> That's not democracy.
Democracy isn't necessarily the same thing as direct democracy, or "everyone votes." The Ancient Greeks didn't practice democracy this way. In any case, democracy isn't a virtue in itself. If one system is democratic according to your standards but the vast majority of its citizens live in squalor while another system is not democratic according to your standards but the vast majority of its citizens live in prosperity, which system is better?
> Historical precedent (both recent and not) shows that concentrating wealth and then giving those wealthy few an inordinate amount of political power does not end well for those disenfranchised by this system.
Historical precedent isn't a rational basis for argument. You don't make stock picks based on precedent. You need to actually examine the causes that result in outcomes to evaluate whether the same outcome would happen again. That said, I have seen good arguments for why weighting votes based on tax contribution would have bad outcomes so I don't agree with him.
> It is not reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt on the basis of Lutke and his ilk maybe being benevolent dictators if given largely unfettered access to the levers of power.
I have no reason to assume Lutke is a bad actor but maybe you know something I don't. Has he done anything to harm anybody or any group of people? Him being rich doesn't make him automatically a bad or suspicious person. There are many rich people who do good things with their wealth and free time.
> I think most people will agree that empowering the edgelord Shopify CEO is not going to improve most people's outcomes.
This is another logical fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
> All you need to do is read his tweets to see that he should have less power (much less), not more
I'd like you to make a real argument. What specific tweet of his implies he should have less power and why?
> Tobias Lutke /../ has most recently advocated for a pay-to-play version of democracy where wealth determines your ability to participate
He’s just looking at america post Citizens United and wishing he could ull the same shenans in Canada. It’s been working very well for the folks and orgs who can afford it
Does Mitchell even need to take outside funding?
I also recoiled a bit when I say that Lutke was on the investors list.
People are only allowed to take funding from investors whose politics align with yours?
"I think this guy is dumb and wrong. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is going to have outsized influence on a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy may profit from a project I'm interested in. Oh no, this dumb wrong guy is using his wealth to do dumb wrong things."
This is a normal and reasonable thought process.
They stated their preference, not that there should be a rule to enforce their preference.
It's really unfortunate that the same traits that make you great at building a business (within capitalism) also often make you have psychopathic tendencies.
Easy to say this when the original commenter incorrectly described Tobias' comments. He suggested that those who pay more in taxes should have a greater say in how the government is spending the money. This is not a crazy idea on its face; you could say that taken to the limit it would not be a good system to live in (the highest taxpayer dictating what gov't does).
But it does make sense that those who are footing the bill for everything might be consulted a little on the plans to spend.
Kind of says something about the system we've chosen to run our societies on, huh?
Now we’re ruled by an oligarchy of psychopaths and everyone’s wondering how this happened
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more info: https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
I’m sorry. I tried to understand what is this about, but I couldn’t. The title didn’t explain it. The description neither.
I remember I heard a saying somewhere that if you can explain what you are doing in a few simple sentences, then is is this really something valuable?
The vision of having a shared interface for all work seems pretty clear to me.
Blog post: https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
> Guillermo Rauch
This guy posted selfies with the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, did you really need his money?
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It sounds like they're building a super-root which can destroy your whole infrastructure at once ???
From their website:
"Building and operating software today spans local machines, remote hosts, sandboxes, services, and production systems. It has many modes of operation: interactively with a human developer, automatically through CI and background processes, and increasingly through agents working in parallel.
[...]
We believe the missing layer is a durable session around the work itself: one that can span applications and environments, provide relevant context by default, expose structured data and actions, preserve history, and be driven by software while remaining visible and controllable by people.
[...]
This is our plan to build a multiplexer for all work: 1 Build an incredible multiplexer. 2 Make everything in it composable. 3 Make it safe and operable in production"
It’s good to be skeptical, but this guy is the inventor of quite a bit of architecture software supporting modern systems
I think it’ll be fine
It’s a terminal multiplexer. Nothing in this announcement suggests to me that using this multiplexer will require the user to get root or super-root or any additional permissions. It’s what the user already has access to, but more “durable” (which I take a mean terminal session history on by default). And I don’t believe any short-lived secrets like ephemeral keys could have their lifetime extended by a terminal multiplexer. And nothing really supersedes RBAC which any respectable org should be using always.
Can't unsee the stark contrast with Anthropic/Bun's recent shenanigans over unreleased rust migrations hehe
Bun and the Rust pre-release have continued to be open source; the pre-release isn’t exclusive to Claude Code but available to anyone to download and use. There hasn’t been any public motion to indicate they may close source anytime soon. This FUD is so easily fact-checkable that I’m genuinely confused at how it caught on
> I’m genuinely confused at how it caught on
Probably because they said AI rewrote it in 11 days, yet haven't cut a release almost 2 months later. If their AI finished it, where's the release?
They ported enough of it to run a single app (Claude Code). Good job. But if I ported Linux to Rust and it was only capable of running a single app, should I be able say it was a complete port? We'd all agree that was misleading. It's the same with Bun.
The marketing lies simply backfired.
> If their AI finished it, where's the release?
`bun upgrade --canary`. You can use it today.
Keeping a large release, like a total rewrite, on canary for a while to iron out bugs is a very reasonable software engineering practice.
> If their AI finished it, where's the release?
Producing a stable release for their community of code that had been written by AI in 11 days and had not yet been extensively tested in the real world would be grossly irresponsible.
Instead, they made the AI rewrite available as a canary release and shipped it for a month as part of Claude Code to millions of their own users.
HN discussions are filled with negative-sentiment AI comments that quickly get upvoted regardless of their connection to reality.
Well i was mostly talking about the "handing over to a non-profit" control parts. Not the release.
but since you said so, could you link me to the release / tag on github? I don't think they've put it out yet?
Maybe they won't change licenses, but Bun now feels more like SQLite as in "source code available" kinda open source, than the "come build with us, community first" kind that i think used to be classified on at least for me mentally.
No horse in this race, just pattern matching as we meatbags love to do.
Idc about the downvoting i can take a bit of heat on my fake internet points
> could you link me to the release / tag on github?
https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases/tag/canary
(I'm not a fan of how they reuse that single tag rather than putting out version-numbered alphas, but they do at least update the description to include the commit hash - "canary" is basically a pointer to the most recent commit hash that they have judged worthy of distributing to their canary users.)
They inflamed an online programming language fandom. It's kinda like if they dissed BTS