VEX
browser gestures become source-code changes
2026
- Drag a div, get a diffVEX turns browser gestures into source-code changes. Three hard problems hide in that sentence — here is what each one taught me.
- It works from the terminalThe app ran perfectly when I launched it from a shell and failed with ENOENT when a user double-clicked it. A GUI app does not have your PATH, and the only thing that knows your PATH is your shell.
- The agent spawned an agent and I could not see itA subagent is a black box that spends your money. Making it inspectable took no new instrumentation at all — the events were already firing, into nothing.
- Six polling loops and a spinning fanVEX was idle and my laptop was audible. The fix was not "poll slower" — it was noticing that a UI which asks "anything new?" sixty times a minute is a UI with no idea what happened.
- The field that was never populatedContinuing a conversation with an agent that already finished turned out to be one line of SDK config and three days of admitting my data model thought agents were disposable.