Huzzah: What If the Prompt Was the Source Code
Every coding agent session throws away its most valuable artifact. You explain your intent in careful English, the agent writes the code, and the explanation evaporates, next change, you start explaining again. Huzzah, a Show HN at 158 points from developer Daniel Vaughn, is an experimental editor built on the opposite premise: the prompt should be a file you keep.
Concretely, you write pseudocode in .hz files, declarative descriptions of what the program should do. Save, and Huzzah generates the real implementation in whatever language you want. Edit the pseudocode later and it diffs your change, regenerating only the affected sections instead of re-feeding the whole intent to the model. Where agent prompts today are longform, imperative and transient, describe the change, watch it happen, lose the description, Huzzah's are pseudocode, declarative and persistent: a standing record of what the software is supposed to be, with generated code as build output. FizzBuzz, a shopping cart and a todo app are the worked examples, and the author is upfront that it is experimental.
The vision has real problems to solve, chief among them what happens when generated code gets hand-edited and drifts from its pseudocode, the exact drift that killed a generation of model-driven-development tools. But the direction rhymes with where serious agent practice was already heading: spec files, CLAUDE.md, design docs as the durable interface to the machine. Huzzah just makes the claim explicit, the durable artifact is your description of the problem, and the code is downstream of it. Notably, the HN crowd argued about the compilation model, not the premise. The premise seems to have quietly won.
https://www.danielvaughn.dev/posts/huzzah/
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Concretely, you write pseudocode in .hz files, declarative descriptions of what the program should do. Save, and Huzzah generates the real implementation in whatever language you want. Edit the pseudocode later and it diffs your change, regenerating only the affected sections instead of re-feeding the whole intent to the model. Where agent prompts today are longform, imperative and transient, describe the change, watch it happen, lose the description, Huzzah's are pseudocode, declarative and persistent: a standing record of what the software is supposed to be, with generated code as build output. FizzBuzz, a shopping cart and a todo app are the worked examples, and the author is upfront that it is experimental.
The vision has real problems to solve, chief among them what happens when generated code gets hand-edited and drifts from its pseudocode, the exact drift that killed a generation of model-driven-development tools. But the direction rhymes with where serious agent practice was already heading: spec files, CLAUDE.md, design docs as the durable interface to the machine. Huzzah just makes the claim explicit, the durable artifact is your description of the problem, and the code is downstream of it. Notably, the HN crowd argued about the compilation model, not the premise. The premise seems to have quietly won.
https://www.danielvaughn.dev/posts/huzzah/
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