Mouse: Precision Editing Tools for AI Coding Agents

(hic-ai.com)

38 points | by handfuloflight 21 hours ago ago

49 comments

  • sfvisser 20 hours ago ago

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

    • embedding-shape 18 hours ago ago

      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.

    • mathisfun123 20 hours ago ago

      Because a provisional patent is trivial to get and meaningless.

    • huflungdung 19 hours ago ago

      [dead]

  • _andrei_ 18 hours ago ago

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

  • thehamkercat 20 hours ago ago

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

  • tritondev 9 hours ago ago

    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...

  • helloplanets 18 hours ago ago

    > 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.

    • handfuloflight 18 hours ago ago

      I guess this is what is meant by AI psychosis?

      • helloplanets 18 hours ago ago

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

        • handfuloflight 18 hours ago ago

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

        • cyanydeez 13 hours ago ago

          sounds like psychosis to me.

  • alex7o 17 hours ago ago

    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 ```

  • ssivark 20 hours ago ago

    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.

  • OJFord 15 hours ago ago

    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?

    • cyanydeez 13 hours ago ago

      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

      • OJFord 3 hours ago ago

        What I mean is when Claude Code for example does its 'grep for the thing in file // sed update the thing in the file' routine, I wouldn't be surprised (but haven't looked) if that's abstracted as some kind of 'select // adjust' tool the same way OP proposes.

  • jonplackett 18 hours ago ago

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

    • handfuloflight 18 hours ago ago

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

    • defrost 18 hours ago ago

      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.

  • conception 20 hours ago ago

    In the same realm to compare to https://www.morphllm.com/products/fastapply

  • piterrro 19 hours ago ago

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

    • blooalien 19 hours ago ago

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

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

      • SturgeonsLaw 18 hours ago ago

        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.

  • mapontosevenths 11 hours ago ago

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

  • ktallett 20 hours ago ago

    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?

  • dep_b 15 hours ago ago

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

  • sudo_cowsay 19 hours ago ago

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

    • jonplackett 18 hours ago ago

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

  • WithinReason 17 hours ago ago

    Page generated by Gemini I would guess

  • croes 19 hours ago ago

    > 14-day free trial

    > patent pending

    Guess what won’t get widely adopted

  • maxignol 18 hours ago ago

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

  • echelon 20 hours ago ago

    > patent-pending

    Instant turn off.

  • Boss0565 19 hours ago ago

    corniest shit ive ever seen

  • n0on3 20 hours ago ago

    “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

    • N_Lens 20 hours ago ago

      Slop me up Scotty!

  • quotemstr 20 hours ago ago

    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

    • blooalien 19 hours ago ago

      > "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/ :)

    • rossant 20 hours ago ago

      Pretty sure this website is satire.

      • quotemstr 20 hours ago ago

        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.

        • blooalien 19 hours ago ago

          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.

      • blooalien 19 hours ago ago

        > "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.

      • N_Lens 20 hours ago ago

        HN? I agree!

  • Elad-Rez 19 hours ago ago

    [flagged]