Ghostty author runs agent loop to cut renderer frame times 88ms to 1.5ms, warns of agent psychosis
stuffyokodraws · x · 2026-09-28
Ghostty creator Mitchell Hashimoto shared an experiment letting a coding agent optimize a renderer in a loop.
- He rewrote Ghostty's core render state in Go as a deliberately naive renderer: 88ms per frame with 150K allocations, backed by identical validation tests
- Constraints: agent can't touch input data structures, public API, or tests — anything else was fair game
- After 4 hours and $350, the agent got frame times from 88ms to 1.5ms and allocations down to 500
- But he stresses this is exactly why "agent psychosis" is a serious problem: impressive surface results demand scrutiny of what shortcuts the agent actually took
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