Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh)

We're still so small but I'm loving the team we've got at Superlogical. They're so talented and kind and love their craft. It's a different era of software development and our expectations and practices reflect that. I want to share a bit about how we work. First, everyone is trusted to push to main. We do machine-aided code review pre-push and human plus more machine-aided code review post-push. Limited to no PRs. Culturally, we've all agreed that if we ever hire someone who we DON'T trust to push directly to main, then they probably aren't the right fit for the team (so far, not an issue). Some common sense here: if someone is stepping outside their lane or comfort zone, we'll open PRs. For example, I'm pretty trash at macOS/iOS UI, so I'll open PRs for UI-affecting functionality and ask for eyeballs/help. But for business logic and internals, I push to main. Second, everyone can cut a release. Our release process is fully automated and when you start a release (for any platform) it triggers a Slack notification and a 15 minute countdown. The 15 minute warning is a final gate that allows people to review plus collaborate on a changelog. During that 15 minutes, anyone in the company can pause the release rollout. After 15 minutes, the train leaves the station. You can't override the 15 minutes (except to pause). It gives everyone a chance to step in. Third, we avoid synchronization through fast remediation rather than through planning. The server and clients on various platforms ship features as fast as they can. We use post-hoc human review and AI-assistance to identify feature mismatches across products ("Windows has support for X and Mac doesn't." or "Mac and Windows differ in their behaviors for Y in this way."). This avoids expensive "sync" meetings and coordination. We trust that producers of features are mindful of what they're producing and we trust that adjacent product lines will self-synchronize quickly. In practice, we see feature parity across platforms within 24 to 48 hours. All of this works on mutual trust. It ONLY works with mutual trust. Everyone at all times has to trust that they've got each others back: 1. Push to main only works if you fix your mess, or if you don't, that someone else will quickly but that you'd do the same (and generally in equal amounts). 2. Anyone can deploy only works if you trust everyone to cut at the right time, with the right changelog, and that people will respect the 15 minute timer. 3. Sync through fast remediation only works if you trust other teams will pick up and integrate your work quickly, which only works if you would too. It also only works if you are fairly producing mismatches (e.g. not constantly). We've got a great team. I know we're still small and that these practices will change in many ways as we scale. But this is already a markedly different practice than what I would've done 15 years ago. In general, we are building from day 1 on a foundation of mutual respect, excellence, and trust. And it's been awesome.

Say hello to Rexie, our mascot for Rex! Superlogical public testing is beginning. We’re working through our mailing list in the order people signed up. Initial testing is limited to macOS but that’ll expand quickly. Welcome, new testers.

I had early access to 5.6/Sol for ~month. Sol is my default. It is faster, plans/judges just as good as Fable, and I think produces better overall work. I’ll reach for Fable still for highly targeted debug or performance work with clear reward functions. A cheeky way I describe Sol vs Fable to my friends is that Sol is a charismatic, efficient, talented coworker you’re jealous of. Fable is a genius recluse that is brilliant at its fixations but doesn’t go out, doesn’t date, and you don’t want to hang out with them much lol. Fable is undefeated at highly targeted debug/security/performance goals. It’s a sight to behold and I was never able to get Sol to push as hard in this category. I’ll keep using it for this. Sol is better or comparable at everything else, in my experience. Give it a shot, it’s hard to describe but it’s just more enjoyable to work with. (Disclaimer I have no financial ties to either lab, wasn’t paid for any of this.)

I'm having a lot success using Fable xhigh as a planner/architect, using GPT 5.5 xhigh (subscription) as a coder, then Fable xhigh again as a judge. At API pricing, planning+judge costs are in the ~few dollar range compared to typical $50+ full round trips. I've seen some others using dumber/cheaper coders, but GPT 5.5 even at xhigh compared to Fable 5 is very cheap and very fast. And GPT 5.5 is just... really good. Still been less than 24hrs since the re-release so the longevity of this approach is unclear, but its been working really well.

Split layout framework update. Since the last video: focus views animate, corner drags can move both axes, cross-window drag and drop with animation, all animations backed by CoreAnimation, and full accessibility framework integration (e.g. compat with VoiceOver). The focus view work was the hardest and most complicated. We allow caller-provided SwiftUI views for the focus style, but have to drop that back to a native AppKit/UIKit hosted view for smooth CoreAnimation integration with our other animations so they move in lock-step with our other stuff. Lot of work to get that to work, but I think it turned out great. The caller lives in easy SwiftUI land we handle that complexity. The animation timings and curves need to be tweaked. I think some animations are too long or don't feel right. But thats just parameterization at this point...

Work-in-progress: a new split layout framework for nearly all Apple platforms (macOS, iOS, etc.). A mix of SwiftUI and raw CoreAnimation. The goal is "every frame perfect" animation. Still very wip, but getting there! Goal is to bring it back to Ghostty eventually.

Got em. I poison my AGENTS.md (and other things like code comments) all over the place with prompt injections like this to find people who don't review their code and sling it off to another human. Catches folks all the time and then its an instant ban. As I've said, I don't care if you don't review your own code. But if you're submitting code to an OSS project and crossing a human boundary, it is simple courtesy to do some human review.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

Ghostty is leaving GitHub. I'm GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008. I've visited GitHub almost every single day for over 18 years. It's never been a question for me where I'd put my projects: always GitHub. I'm super sad to say this, but its time to go.