alt Hacker NewsShow HN: ctx – an Agentic Development Environment (ADE)
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The merge queue is the part that matters most and gets the least attention. Running agents in parallel is easy. Landing their changes cleanly when two agents touch overlapping files is the unsolved part. Most tools just hope it doesn't happen.
I don't understand why so many people building agents feel the need to fork and maintain a whole IDE as well
Looks cool! Two things: I see you mentioned the merge queue, but how exactly do people avoid or resolve merge conflicts when merging work from two or more agents in the separate worktrees? I havent really seen a seamless way to approach this or do people just have the agents work on distinctly unrelated stuff? Secondly, are containers the primary sandboxing appraoch? or do you support vms?
OP here. Happy to answer questions.
The multi-thread, worktree-based interface will probably look familiar. The parts HN may care more about are the containerized workspaces, remote-host model, and local merge queue for multi-agent work.
Your repo says it's open source, but it's missing the source.
Appears to not work on Linux. Just launches, doesn't install an application file, window is blank on launch, and menu bar is all greyed out.
Very nice. Does this support GitHub Copilot subscriptions (oauth/hmac) or do you have plans for it? That would make or break for me because of the API costs.
Similarly I built a self-host able replit-like server with RAG but it's more end-user focused than developer focused...
Does this solve indexing of codebases like Cursor does, or do you still need tools / plugins like Lumen (https://github.com/ory/lumen) for that in order to work in larger codebases without wasting tens of thousands of tokens on tool calls and brute force guessing with grep?
Interesting, one challenge with other ADEs (nice term btw) like Conductor is that code navigation is terrible and too much emphasis is on a GUI for Claude.
We really need the best of both worlds: IDE (powerful like Intellij) + ADE (multitasking code)
And how does it compare to other tools like Conductor?
I really appreciated this overview of when to use an IDE vs an ADE:
TLDR: use an ADE if you need multiple agents working concurrently on your code base. Otherwise IDE with an agent plugin is probably fine.
No thanks. We have a strict no-ai policy.
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Fundamentally one of my biggest gripes with tools like this is that often you are not working with a single repo in anything beyond simple apps.
When I am working with Claude I am often doing it from the root directory of a workspace of dozens of repos. I work with Claude to come up with a plan for implementing a feature and it investigates and plans.That plan often encompasses multiple repositories. Claude then turns large scale plans into smaller issues, or tickets as artifacts.