Remember that "hawk tuah" meme that took over the internet? Well, I couldn't resist naming my latest Rust CLI after it. Meet hackertuah - and yes, the name alone got some chuckles when it hit the front page of Hacker News.

This whole thing started when I wanted a better way to browse HN from my terminal. I'm a terminal guy, what can I say. So I opened up Claude.ai with a simple prompt: help me build a Hacker News CLI in Rust.

20 Minutes to Working Code. In Rust!

Here's what blew my mind - I had something actually working in 20 minutes. Not Python. Not JavaScript. Rust! A language known for its learning curve, and Claude was just cranking out working code like it was nothing.

That first session was pure magic. Claude understood the HN API, set up the project structure, handled the async HTTP requests, and even got the terminal UI looking decent with colored output and proper formatting.

Enter Cursor: The Refinement Phase

Once I had the basics working, I switched over to Cursor to really polish things up. This is where "vibe coding" really kicked in. I'd just describe what I wanted - "make the comment threads collapsible", "add a search function", "cache the results" - and Cursor Composer with Sonnet would just... do it.

I barely touched the keyboard. SuperWhisper for voice input, Accept All on the diffs. The code was growing beyond what I'd normally write myself, but it worked beautifully.

Then I hit the Cursor credits limit (classic). But I wasn't done yet.

Claude Code: The Final Polish

This is where Claude Code came in clutch. Being able to iterate on the CLI directly from my terminal felt like the perfect way to dogfood my own tool while building it. Added better error handling, cleaned up the async code, and made the whole thing more robust.

The workflow was incredible - test locally, find a bug, describe it to Claude Code, get a fix, test again. The iteration speed was unreal.

From Side Project to Show HN Success

On November 6th, I posted it to Show HN. Within hours, hackertuah climbed to the top 20. The response was amazing - people loved the name (obviously), but also genuinely found the tool useful.

The whole project lives at github.com/program247365/hackertuah if you want to check it out.

What This Means

This project perfectly captures where we are with AI-assisted development right now. I built a fully functional, production-ready CLI tool in Rust - a language I'm not even an expert in - and got it to the front page of Hacker News, all in less time than it used to take me to set up a basic Node project.

The combination of Claude.ai for initial development, Cursor for rapid iteration, and Claude Code for terminal-based refinement is absolutely game-changing. We're not just writing code faster; we're building entire projects at the speed of thought.

Is this "vibe coding"? Maybe. But when the vibes are this good and the results speak for themselves, I'm all in.

🚀 Go ahead and cargo install hackertuah - you know you want to.