Show HN: Gitcasso – Syntax Highlighting and Draft Recovery for GitHub Comments (github.com)
- Adds markdown syntax highlighting to GitHub textareas
- Lists every open PR/issue tab and any drafts
- (Optional, unimplemented) autosaves your comment drafts so you don’t lose work
I made it because I was impressed by https://overtype.dev/ (a markdown textarea syntax highlighter) which went big on here on HN a few weeks ago, and it seemed like a perfect fit for a GitHub browser extension. Keeping up with changes on upstream GitHub would normally be a pain, but with with Playwright and Claude Code it seemed possible for it to be nearly automatic, which has turned out to be mostly true!
This was the first time where I built a tool, gave the tool to AI, and then AI used the tool to make the thing I hoped it would be able to make. I'm pretty sold on the general technique...
GitHub repo (Apache2-licensed, open source): https://github.com/diffplug/gitcasso
Video walkthrough (2 mins of the tool, 12 mins of its development tooling): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm7fVg4DWqk
And a text writeup with timestamps to the video walkthrough https://nedshed.dev/p/meet-gitcasso
7 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] threadBut when I tried your Chrome extension, I found a problem - the comment box became light mode, when GitHub is in dark mode...
I have opened a GitHub issue about this problem.
https://github.com/settings/appearance
1. It'd save a lot of time if one could just click a Markdown PR description and start editing it, without entering edit mode first.
2. Thanks to the following prompt, I barely write PR descriptions these days.
> Run `gh pr view` then `gh pr edit` to fill out the PR description. Use my words verbatim as much as possible. Be brief. Use tasteful markdown formatting.
But I find the other two features to be less useful, personally. I tend to do all writing in my favorite text editor (where I'm writing this now), which is already configured with syntax highlighting, and all my editing preferences. I can save my work at any time, and always have a local copy of it. In contrast, typing in textareas is a cumbersome and risky experience no matter how friendly the UI is. One wrong click or keypress could waste minutes or hours of your time. We all have our workflow preferences, of course, but I would encourage any technical person to use their editor instead. If you don't like manually copy/pasting text back and forth, there are browser extensions that automate opening up an editor, and syncing the contents with a specific textearea.
I watched your video walkthrough, and as someone who still uses LLMs exclusively via a conversational UI, it's shocking to me that it took you 7 minutes to update the "corpus" for the LLM, and run several commands, only for the actual fix to be a single-character change in a CSS selector. Sure, the difficult thing is knowing which file and character to change, but given the issue, any developer familiar with the codebase would instinctively know where to look first, and fix the issue in a fraction of that time. Maybe even add a test case for it.
This is far from the efficiency and speed these tools were promised to deliver. Aside from the fact that you admit not having an understanding of the testing framework you vibe coded, when your entire development workflow depends on it. If this is the future of software development, as you claim, what a bleak future it is.
BTW, you have a very nice shed, Ned. :)