Haikode: putting AI in Haiku

I know that AI-assisted development — and especially “vibe coding” — has been a rather contentious subject around here lately. I’m not posting this to reopen that debate, or to suggest that this is how Haiku itself should be developed. But since the origin of the code matters to quite a few people here, I’d rather be completely upfront about it: haikode is heavily vibe-coded.

I originally made it for myself because I wanted an AI coding agent I could run directly on Haiku while debugging things and working on drivers, without having to keep another machine involved.

It runs natively on Haiku, talks directly to the model providers over HTTPS, and is written using only the Python 3 standard library — no Node, Bun, pip packages or remote server required. It has a curses TUI, a plain terminal interface and a native BeAPI desktop frontend.

So yes: I’ve been using AI to build something that helps me use AI to work on Haiku, which is perhaps a little recursive. And I’m fairly sure I’m not the first person to call a project “haikode”.

My favourite feature is probably one that serves absolutely no practical purpose: the haiku.

When haikode starts, it greets you with a haiku from its collection. When you finish a session with /farewell, the agent writes a new haiku based on the conversation you just had, signs it with its model name, and saves it to your personal collection. Those farewells then become part of the pool of poems that can greet you in future sessions.

Since Haiku itself is named after a form of poetry, it felt like the application ought to behave accordingly.

It has become genuinely useful for my own Haiku work, particularly when debugging and experimenting with driver development, so I thought others might find it interesting too.

The repository is public here:

https://github.com/big-hill/haikode

The README includes a fairly honest account of what works, what is incomplete, and the known gaps.

I’m not expecting everyone here to approve of how it was made, but feedback, bug reports and experiments on real Haiku installations are very welcome.

Thanks btw for a truly great community and forum.

Haiku is awesome!!

PS: Yes, the text above is summarized partly with the help of ChatGPT, in case it wasn’t already obvious – with the em-dashes, wink-wink.