Robert Travis Pierce

Systems Designer & Developer using Rails (20+ yrs). Building on the bleeding edge of AI tools. Steward of

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

https://t.co/PBJvxxoddl

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

@FChristopher77 Господи Іисусе Христе, Сыне Божїй, помилуй мя грѣшнаго. Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhiy, pomiluy mya greshnago. (Church Slavonic)

[Father Christopher @FChristopher77]

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner!

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

@BenSasse h/t @roddreher for the link via his article: Ben Sasse's Golgotha, by @roddreher https://t.co/FijnrMoBFt

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

Hero level achieved: @BenSasse

A “must watch”: https://t.co/aiv5QCVRo1

O Christ, grant rest to Thy servant with the saints, where there is neither pain, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

Stay vigilant out there. This just happened today (I haven’t seen it out of Claude in awhile):

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

Zed 0.225 markdown preview now renders Mermaid diagrams. Pretty cool @zeddotdev

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

And I’m being robbed of the self-satisfaction of knowing I’m using em dashes properly, when they are (were) not used that commonly. Hrmph. 😕

[Emerson Green @waldenpod]

You have no idea how much I resent AI for completely ruining a perfectly good sentence structure: "It's not just x – it's y." You cannot write that anymore. Everyone will assume it's AI or get derailed wondering if it's AI. We've been robbed of an entire sentence form.

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

Favorite roles from a master of his craft: 1. Lonesome Dove | 2. Open Range | 3. Secondhand Lions

RIP Mr. Duvall.

[Galleywinter @galleywinter]

Some years back Robert Duvall stopped off at the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco.

He was in awe of the place and voluntarily cut this promo for them. Off the cuff he delivered the coolest museum testimonial of all time.

“Gus and Woodrow would have really liked this place.”

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

@edimoldovan @dhh Yes, you can completely pre-configure, manage, and reuse, your tmux layouts and sessions by using tmuxinator (https://t.co/w6u4Gbjotr). Yes, it's one more (minor) layer of abstraction, but a very useful one.

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

I've used iTerm2 for a long time. I tried Ghosttty and loved the speed and feel. What really won me over is the really compelling story of it's founder and actions: (from Claude):

The Founder: Mitchell Hashimoto
He co-founded HashiCorp — the company behind Terraform, Vagrant, and Vault. So this isn't some unknown hobbyist; he's one of the most respected infrastructure engineers in the industry. He left HashiCorp and started Ghostty in 2021 as a personal side project, partly to understand how terminals actually work at a deep level, partly to explore Zig and GPU programming.

The Values
Mitchell has been very explicit that Ghostty is a reflection of his personal values. His core thesis was that every existing terminal forced you to choose between speed, features, or native platform feel — and he wanted all three. He describes it as a "labor of love" and has been notably humble about it, saying it's not revolutionary, not for everyone, and not done.
What's particularly telling is his philosophy on terminal infrastructure: he believes foundational developer tools like terminals should be stewarded by mission-driven, non-commercial entities rather than profit-seeking companies.

The Non-Profit Move (December 2025)
This is the big one. Ghostty is now fiscally sponsored by Hack Club, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit. Mitchell Hashimoto Mitchell was very intentional about this — the non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. Mitchell Hashimoto
He explicitly structured it so that no funds will be sent to him or used in any way that personally benefits him Mitchell Hashimoto, and his family separately donated $150,000 to Hack Club's broader mission of empowering young people in tech.

The Architecture Vision
Beyond just being a terminal, Mitchell designed Ghostty around libghostty — a cross-platform C-ABI library that does the core terminal emulation. The macOS app is Swift/AppKit, the Linux app is Zig/GTK4, both consuming that shared library. His long-term goal is to stabilize and release libghostty as a standalone library so other projects can build on it — essentially wanting to lift the entire terminal ecosystem rather than just his own app.
So Ghostty is a legally protected non-profit passion project by someone who already made his money and is genuinely trying to build lasting public infrastructure.

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

h/t to @joemasilotti for introducing me to the friction issue/thought process (https://t.co/sR5pXfVOjH)

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

https://t.co/PBJvxxoddl

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

@obie It seems weird that I immediately recognized what you were describing; and, in fact, essentially acted out the same scenarios at least twice today. Wild times.
Help lead us through the wilderness @obie!

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

https://t.co/CjFdh2X217

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

This matches what I've seen. Plan mode spawns explore, explore re-reads files the parent already read, context gets cleared, everything gets re-read again. Agents orchestrating agents that orchestrate agents.

I went the other direction: multiple Claude Code instances coordinated through tmux. Each agent is a full process with its own context. No nested sub-agents, no duplicated reads. tmux send-keys for real-time broadcast, shared markdown files for async state.

Wrote it up here: https://t.co/Iih0KdrhR9

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

I woke up this morning thinking about how Markdown has become the lingua franca of human/ai communication.

I wonder how John Gruber must feel about that.

Kudos to you @gruber (& @aaronsw).

And thank you.

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

@joemasilotti Go Joe! I'm right behind you (slated an iOS app w CC in the next couple of weeks). Please post your progress; and sharp edges encountered. 😟

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

Now that I think about it, it was probably Textmate where I first used the Railscasts theme. An enduring gem from @rbates!

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

Hah! I'm starting to really enjoy having my local AI bot (CC) around. I was getting a little tired of my dark theme for Zed (Gruvbox dark I think).

Me: I'd like to change the Zed theme to a different dark
theme. What I would actually love is the old Railscasts
theme from SublimeText etc.

Bot: No Railscasts theme installed. I can create one as a custom Zed theme. The classic Railscasts palette is well-known.

Not a world changer; but a tiny, life improvement that previously would not have happened because of the context-switch and time cost.

[Robert Travis Pierce @roberttpierce]

lol. Best one of the bunch.

[Ned Stark @FantasyWorldW1]

Lord of the Rings characters as popular memes!