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.
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 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.
> 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
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.)
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.
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 :)
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 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!
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.
Really exciting IMO. Many people are 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.
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.
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...
If you read it again you will notice that technically he thinks that, to satisfy those who believe the wealthy don't pay tax, Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote. Often the wealthy have no need for income as they already have so much wealth and can easily borrow against that wealth as cash needs present themselves. It is believed (at least as far as the thread went) that the wealthy currently don't pay tax, and thus would be unable to vote, or their vote would count for little, under the proposed since they don't have sufficient income to qualify.
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.
Not at all. The idea is that his class claim very little income, if any income. His income class is ~$0 (or believed to be, at least). You can certainly make an argument that the claim isn't true, that the ultra-wealthy are actually already paying huge sums in income tax, but then you cannot take the thread out of context. It was clearly directed at those who believe the wealthy pay no income tax. It literally says so. Did you skip step one and not go back to read it again?
> He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember
You are correct, approximately, but there would have been no need to remember given step one, so that was clearly ignored. Why? What is the purpose of replying without even reading the comment you are replying to?
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.
Care about what? The thread was clearly making fun of those who think the wealthy don't pay any income tax. It literally states that the plan is proposed for those who complain the wealthy don't pay tax, not a plan to be set in motion. Tobi, who fits the wealthy profile of who supposedly doesn't pay tax better than almost anyone, will know well that he already does pay income tax, hence why he humorously threw salt in the wounds of those who don't have a solid grasp of reality.
Being wealthy doesn't mean you can't be a troll. You'd think after seeing Musk in action that would have already been obvious to all, but I guess not.
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.
Along with a myriad of different controversies. Just searching his name will bring up many articles about his chronically online Elon Musk wannabe takes.
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
This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately...
- pi-web: a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines
- herdr: a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI
- firstmate: a meta environment for coding agents, more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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 malicious people.
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.
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?
> 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
"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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901
Considering it's going to consume libghostty, I'm betting it'll be Zig.
They hire for Go.
> 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
Like notable lifestyle businesses Datadog, Squarespace, Etsy, Tinder, and Snap.
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.)
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.
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 :)
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 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.
Really exciting IMO. Many people are 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.
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...
VCs tend to be a toxic bunch. Hard to avoid that in our business
more info please!
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...
Ladybird contributors have their own controversies that make the project hard to stomach
It is a good thing you can use Google chrome instead which has zero contributors with stances you disagree with... I guess.
Ok, what is the new drama this time around?
He thinks ability to vote (and the number of votes you get) should be based on income.
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/business/article/shopify-...
Taxes paid was actually what was said.
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"
It doesn't have to be that complicated. Just absolute terms could have the desired effect.
- 1% tax of 10 million = 100k
- 20% tax of 100k = 20k
Hence, the rich pays more tax.
Maybe worth mentioning that the founding fathers in the US believed only property owners should vote.
If you read it again you will notice that technically he thinks that, to satisfy those who believe the wealthy don't pay tax, Canada could use a system to encourage the wealthy to claim income, where that is incentivized by being able to vote. Often the wealthy have no need for income as they already have so much wealth and can easily borrow against that wealth as cash needs present themselves. It is believed (at least as far as the thread went) that the wealthy currently don't pay tax, and thus would be unable to vote, or their vote would count for little, under the proposed since they don't have sufficient income to qualify.
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.
> which is a rounding error to his income class.
Not at all. The idea is that his class claim very little income, if any income. His income class is ~$0 (or believed to be, at least). You can certainly make an argument that the claim isn't true, that the ultra-wealthy are actually already paying huge sums in income tax, but then you cannot take the thread out of context. It was clearly directed at those who believe the wealthy pay no income tax. It literally says so. Did you skip step one and not go back to read it again?
> He caps his example at 800k reported income, if I remember
You are correct, approximately, but there would have been no need to remember given step one, so that was clearly ignored. Why? What is the purpose of replying without even reading the comment you are replying to?
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.
Care about what? The thread was clearly making fun of those who think the wealthy don't pay any income tax. It literally states that the plan is proposed for those who complain the wealthy don't pay tax, not a plan to be set in motion. Tobi, who fits the wealthy profile of who supposedly doesn't pay tax better than almost anyone, will know well that he already does pay income tax, hence why he humorously threw salt in the wounds of those who don't have a solid grasp of reality.
Being wealthy doesn't mean you can't be a troll. You'd think after seeing Musk in action that would have already been obvious to all, but I guess not.
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.
https://xcancel.com/tobi/status/2081155797640171641
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.
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
This is literally what capitalism tells us to do though, isn't it? If you don't like it, don't buy it.
No, this is "omnicause" / "intersectionality" type thinking.
I think we might be talking about different things. My understanding is that voting with your wallet is orthogonal to why you want to do it.
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
This sounds like a mashup of of several things I've been playing with lately...
- pi-web: a web frontend for the Pi coding harness which can multiplex pi sessions across multiple machines
- herdr: a fairly polished agentic multiplexer TUI
- firstmate: a meta environment for coding agents, more naturally handles spawning and communicating with subagents, and has a fairly large number of constraints thru bash scripts to ensure better results with less intelligent models
`ssh superlogical.jobs` gives me same vibe as telnet bbs when I was in college :)
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.
This doesn't seem like a niche that isn't filled. Am I missing out on something by still just using iTerm2 and tmux?
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.
I imagine something more like herdr, but done at the terminal level, not inside. But that’s cmux…
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?
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
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
Commercializing and integrating (openclawing ?) cmux to take all the jerbs?
https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux
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.
https://github.com/alienxp03/kesh
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.
might be a related sneak peek here: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2079327969416482859
can't wait for more details!
Very cool to see a man execute on his vision. Ghostty -> libghostty -> terminal multiplexing -> ???
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
So excited to see what this dream team cooks!
This but software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergroup_(music)
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
Kind of funny that he lists himself as "Creator of Ghostty" first and not Hashicorp.
"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
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.
Funded by Mario Zechner (pi.dev) among others.
So, at least 2 of some dudes.
domain could be very good for some relevant AI startup and not multiplexer..
ssh superlogical.jobs
This actually works!
the careers page is just `ssh superlogical.jobs` which is kinda cool
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.
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?
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.
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
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 ~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.
> 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
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.
> 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
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.
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 malicious people.
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?
> 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
> Guillermo Rauch
This guy posted selfies with the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, did you really need his money?
https://x.com/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031
more info: https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
Blog post: https://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical
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.