alt Hacker NewsProspero: A new coding harness for a more civilized age
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Looks great.
Hey… the code looks good, I’m curious what is your development process? The parts I looked at looked almost like they were written by a human manually.
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.
If you're looking for an agent implementation that is light on resources, but prefer to work in a terminal, consider also hax (https://usehax.dev/). Less than 2 MB fully static Linux binary, few MBs of RAM use in runtime. Works great with local models also (auto-detects config from running llama-server), besides the usual cloud providers.
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!
There are so many cool harnesses I could use if I didn't have an outrageously subsidized Claude subscription
No mention of "plugin" or "extension". At this point I am not going to even try one that isn't modular; that's my bar now. Life's too short to wait for folks to prioritize my pet features, just let me do it myself.
i believe a harness is a personalized thing. everyone should develop their own. doesn't take long to have a working prototype, after that you can extend it as you use it.
As a counterpoint to a lot of the comments on this now portraying this as dated and questioning the stack behind - this is has the guts of great enterprise level software. Once you’ve serious data being thrown at something built on JS and run into OOMs, that’s when good old C(rust in the future maybe) stack shows these up.
Love to see such a strong tasteful take on software heralding back to the age of solid desktop apps.
I created one as well with rust and tauri works great
A year ago I never felt my MacBook was short on resources, but these days I find myself thinking a lot about the performance of harnesses and agent tools.
So much efficient use of space though, would love to have this UI on top of opencode/codex
App-server protocol: https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/app-server
Opencode: https://opencode.ai/docs/server/
How does this compare with Zed though?
i am looking for harness that lets me fork sessions in tree and visually support that tree. I know i can fork a session in any harness. But its hard keep track if you go more than one level deep.
I dont know if i am unique here but i often work in exploratory mode where i persue a chain of thought in a specific direction, then backtrack up and go down again arbitrarily.
There are so many Prosperos already. Why choose a name that is so heavily overloaded?
I'd really like to see a comprehensive test of all of those 100s of agentic harnesses. Get a billionaire to give a million to crunch through them all within a week or so.
I like how this is laid out. Will have to give it a try.
What a beautiful and space efficient UI. I love Dear ImGUI and the people that build interfaces with it.
Reading through the whole post, this sounds like an thoughtfully and intentionally designed product. One with strong opinions and the developer’s real lessons behind it. In the current era of slopware- especially around AI tooling - this is giving me damn near an emotional reaction. I am happy to see this.
Prospero was the original code name for the ps5 console that is recently jailbroken. That’s why you’re seeing a lot of other unrelated projects with this name too.
>Prospero is a native GUI application for Windows, macOS, and Linux
But right above this statement, on the Professional Edition purchase page, it says its only for Windows and Mac..
magnus breaths heavily
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JavaScript is just about the worst thing ever and why would you use that as middleware for anything if you didn't have to? I mean, I get using Visual Studio Code, if you don't care about your business processes, intellectual property or engineers and are just outsourcing everything, but imagine actually trusting it for your coding stack like some kind of middle manager who only cares about cutting costs to the bone? Or like, you're riding the AI bubble and want to release some minimal viable product as fast as possible, but it's 2026 now. Covid was 6 years ago.
Looks like shit and part with professional edition killed me. Bro are we in 2000?
First time I see a software licensed with the Unlicense.
I thought it meant the license was missing on GitHub but, no, it's an actual license called the Unlicense.
But then there is the Community and Pro edition so which is which on GitHub? Is the pro version hidden somewhere?
Plus a c++ code base in 2026. I think modern c++ can be made quite safe but I need some claims that it's taken seriously which I don't see.
I'm confused.
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.