alt.hn

7/5/2026 at 5:01:14 AM

Mouse: Precision Editing Tools for AI Coding Agents

https://hic-ai.com

by handfuloflight

7/5/2026 at 5:40:32 AM

Why does “patent pending” almost automatically sounds like it’s going to be an underwhelming technology.

by sfvisser

7/5/2026 at 7:26:50 AM

Because most of the people rushing to get patents are money-horny people, not people who believe they truly are about to change the world, so it's a great signal that this is yet another idea from money-horny people.

by embedding-shape

7/5/2026 at 6:19:04 AM

Because a provisional patent is trivial to get and meaningless.

by mathisfun123

7/5/2026 at 7:11:07 AM

[dead]

by huflungdung

7/5/2026 at 4:22:50 PM

I decided to build a pure functional, open-source, programming language (Lisp-inspired) to help my dev tools do complex editing.

The idea is the AI writes a functional transform for a file or editor buffer of whatever form it needs.

Brief LinkedIn note with an example: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davejh_its-a-great-feeling-wh...

by tritondev

7/5/2026 at 7:25:04 AM

claude invent me revolutionary text editing method for agents and write paper, must make me big money i patent

by _andrei_

7/5/2026 at 12:50:39 PM

better: "Claude, please search https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search/patent-public-search for a patent that made a lot of money and has obvious traits we can slightly tweak to get anothr patent; do this for each patent, then write patent application for each"

by cyanydeez

7/5/2026 at 8:25:57 AM

make no mistakes

by fmbb

7/5/2026 at 11:11:20 AM

Or you go to jail

by ironbound

7/5/2026 at 6:01:03 AM

Would've resulted in a positive response from people if you just did your work and didn't brag about your "patent pending" stuff

by thehamkercat

7/5/2026 at 7:47:24 AM

> Both conditions used GitHub Copilot (Claude Sonnet 4.5 or Haiku 4.5, depending on study) running in VS Code within isolated Docker containers. The only difference was Mouse tool availability. (https://hic-ai.com/papers/mouse-paper-v13.pdf)

Haiku/Sonnet 4.5 on GitHub Copilot is not a valid comparison whatsoever.

You need to benchmark against Claude Code running Opus. I mean, being revolutionary is a big claim to fame.

by helloplanets

7/5/2026 at 7:53:29 AM

I guess this is what is meant by AI psychosis?

by handfuloflight

7/5/2026 at 8:02:06 AM

Not at all. This looks just like someone trying to make a quick buck, hyping their product up with bad benchmarks.

by helloplanets

7/5/2026 at 8:03:13 AM

You don't think there's some LLM behind the scenes deeply encouraging them to pursue this as revolutionary, worthy of patent, etc?

by handfuloflight

7/5/2026 at 12:53:59 PM

sounds like psychosis to me.

by cyanydeez

7/5/2026 at 8:45:09 AM

I didn't want to mock them but are these guys for real:

```

Instead of:

    "Update the checklist to mark items 1.2, 1.4, and 1.5 as done."
Try:

    "Mark items 1.2, 1.4, and 1.5 as complete in the checklist. Only insert an x in each checkbox. Do not copy or replace any of the item descriptions."
```

There is not universe in which this would make agents more efficient - and who is prompting their agents like that in the first place?

I also asked glm to extract all the tools and tell me how they work roughly and nothing interesting really just slop:

```

The server exposes exactly 11 tools (verified via the xa whitelist at L16918, not the larger Eo metadata map which contains ~24 tool definitions — most are dead/legacy):

- 6 read/meta: read_first_n_lines, read_last_n_lines, read_lines, jump_to_line_n, find_in_file, get_file_metadata

- 3 edit/control: quick_edit (6 ops: insert/delete/replace/replace_range/for_lines/adjust), batch_quick_edit (atomic, always-staged, max 500 ops, multi-file), save_changes, cancel_changes

- 1 always-on: license_status

Notable design choices:

- Coordinate-based addressing (line/char/rect) instead of content-echo — saves tokens

- Staging model: edits go to an in-memory shadow, save_changes is the only disk mutation

- The rect + move "click-and-drag" columnar editor (v0.9.7) is the genuinely novel bit

- ReDoS static analyser (~700 lines) protects find_in_file ```

by alex7o

7/5/2026 at 11:14:53 AM

Sounds sort of interesting, except easily implementable with the bad old 'string replacement' as a skill/tool or something? In fact harnesses probably already have some such abstraction?

by OJFord

7/5/2026 at 12:53:26 PM

most harnesses try to prevents find/replace because as the FBI found out with the Epstein documents, it's not a useful heuristic.

I believe openode uses a tool that requires line numbers and the model needs to write the entire line again. It also prevents it from making changes if it hasn't read the document since it was last changed.

There's certainly improvements, but no, the simple cli commands arn't properly made to do what a dumb model wants to do, since the dumb model isn't ever going to consider there's a bunch of other Donalds or Trumps or DTs that are completely innucuos

by cyanydeez

7/5/2026 at 5:53:51 AM

I doubt they're the first solution to use coordinate based editing, or even the best one right now.

Eg: Check out hash-anchored editing. The first place where I recall seeing this was the oh-my-pi coding agent, but I wouldn't be surprised if the idea originated earlier/elsewhere.

I wonder whether CRDTs could be a good solution for multiple agents editing the same codebase in parallel.

by ssivark

7/5/2026 at 2:41:21 PM

Just give the LLM AST grep. They already know how to use it.

by mapontosevenths

7/5/2026 at 7:37:50 AM

Someone explain how the HN algorithm has put this on the front page

by jonplackett

7/5/2026 at 7:39:47 AM

To mock it, I guess. I found it on a comment here on HN, by the creator of it.

by handfuloflight

7/5/2026 at 7:43:40 AM

At a guess:

- No "bad history" from submitter.

- No detected "obvious slop" signs

- Relatively (near zero) few comments during first hour, during which time it received steady, unclustered, unique upvotes.

- No actual mod took a look and weighted it either way

HN algo weights against rapid fire comment trees (sign of "controversy / chat" rather than thoughtful content (sort of)), obvious bot activity, upvotes from sketchy sources, etc - other than that submissions are pretty much bound for front page if they get a rate of organic votes.

by defrost

7/5/2026 at 6:36:05 AM

So I’ll have to buy a license for using my mouse now?

by piterrro

7/5/2026 at 6:53:34 AM

> "So I’ll have to buy a license for using my mouse now?"

You'll have to rent a license to use their mouse.

by blooalien

7/5/2026 at 7:27:43 AM

The most baffling thing is that this is not (as I had assumed) about giving agents control of a mouse cursor, instead it's finer-grained text editing skills.

The word mouse has had an established meaning in computing for over half a century, so it seems like an odd term to lay claim to for something so unrelated.

by SturgeonsLaw

7/5/2026 at 8:01:30 AM

Cursor was taken.

by handfuloflight

7/5/2026 at 11:09:45 AM

Reminder me of all those “{trivial thing}, on the internet” patents 25 year ago

by dep_b

7/5/2026 at 6:01:04 AM

As others have said, text editing isn't patentable, and this does not have anything that is patent worthy. However I suspect this is more someone who has no clue what the difference between patent, copyright, and IP is. Was this whole thing vibe coded btw?

by ktallett

7/5/2026 at 7:12:00 AM

I hope this isn't trying to be very serious.

by sudo_cowsay

7/5/2026 at 7:35:18 AM

Yeah, I was waiting for the punchline, but it never came

by jonplackett

7/5/2026 at 8:24:08 AM

Page generated by Gemini I would guess

by WithinReason

7/5/2026 at 6:27:30 AM

> 14-day free trial

> patent pending

Guess what won’t get widely adopted

by croes

7/5/2026 at 7:31:50 AM

I guess the technology used here must be ground-breaking lol

by maxignol

7/5/2026 at 6:01:45 AM

> patent-pending

Instant turn off.

by echelon

7/5/2026 at 6:41:55 AM

corniest shit ive ever seen

by Boss0565

7/5/2026 at 6:03:17 AM

“the most powerful AI agent file-editing tool in the world […] patent-pending”… tl;dr: turn tool calls into more structured loops, give it some fancy name and slop about it https://hic-ai.com/blog/tool-response-engineering

Good luck with that

by n0on3

7/5/2026 at 6:09:25 AM

Slop me up Scotty!

by N_Lens

7/5/2026 at 5:41:18 AM

Patent pending? On what?

> insert a line, delete a range, replace a character, edit a column

The ed(1) command set 50 years old. I doubt it's patentable. These guys are far from the first to apply fine-grained text editing to LLM toolsets. I've been teaching models to do it for years. Hell, models want to use sed and awk so much that you have to hold them back.

I'm so repulsed by the idea that these guys think they can fence off a slice of the ancient commons, claim they discovered it, and charge $15/month to access it that I want nothing to do with them and will go to the mattresses to make sure they can't. Nobody owns text editing, not even when it's an AI doing it.

Mouse: sincerely, fuck you

by quotemstr

7/5/2026 at 7:02:48 AM

> "I've been teaching models to do it for years. Hell, models want to use sed and awk so much that you have to hold them back."

Yeah, I been givin' Qwen a "toolchain" containing `sed`,`awk`,`rg`, and `git` in a "sandbox" directory for playin' around with text editing lately. Havin' a ton of fun dinkin' around with Ollama, Python, and Qwen. Don't need much more'n that to get yerself into all kinda trouble. ;)

Qwen and Gemma make a real fine pair with a bit of Python "glue" too. Gemma's real good with image data (classifying and describing, tagging, title-ing, extracting and translating text, etc) and Qwen's better at code related stuff, so... Teamwork, yay! \o/ :)

by blooalien

7/5/2026 at 6:04:45 AM

Pretty sure this website is satire.

by rossant

7/5/2026 at 6:19:36 AM

Not sure what would make you think that.

https://hic-ai.com/papers/mouse-paper-v13.pdf seems like an awfully lot of trouble to go through for a joke that isn't even funny.

HIC AI is a Delaware corporation, registration number 10476082, incorporated 1/16/2026.

by quotemstr

7/5/2026 at 6:56:44 AM

Yeah, and they have a Discord channel, and a GitHub repo, and all that junk too. Awful lotta trouble to go to for attempted joke/satire. More likely a vibe-slop scam-corp tryin'a cash in on the AI hype-train; feels like it from what I've read on their site and GitHub thus far anywho.

by blooalien

7/5/2026 at 6:52:27 AM

> "Pretty sure this website is satire."

Pretty sure they think it's "real", but yeah, nope. Wouldn't touch this with a fifty foot pole.

by blooalien

7/5/2026 at 6:09:45 AM

HN? I agree!

by N_Lens

7/5/2026 at 6:28:27 AM

[flagged]

by Elad-Rez