Mouse: Precision Editing Tools for AI Coding Agents

https://hic-ai.com

by handfuloflight • 18 days ago

38 46 18 days ago

hic-ai.com

sfvisser• 18 days ago

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

mathisfun123• 18 days ago

Because a provisional patent is trivial to get and meaningless.

embedding-shape• 18 days 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.

quotemstr2• 18 days 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

rossant• 18 days ago

Pretty sure this website is satire.

N_Lens2• 18 days ago

HN? I agree!

quotemstr2• 18 days 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.

blooalien4• 18 days 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.

blooalien4• 18 days 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/ :)

conception• 18 days ago

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

ssivark• 18 days 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.

thehamkercat• 18 days 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

ktallett• 18 days 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?

echelon• 18 days ago

patent-pending

Instant turn off.

n0on3• 18 days 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_Lens2• 18 days ago

Slop me up Scotty!

croes• 18 days ago

14-day free trial
patent pending

Guess what won’t get widely adopted

piterrro• 18 days ago

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

blooalien4• 18 days 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 days 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.

Boss0565• 18 days ago

corniest shit ive ever seen

sudo_cowsay• 18 days ago

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

jonplackett2• 18 days ago

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

_andrei_• 18 days ago

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

fmbb• 18 days ago

make no mistakes

ironbound• 17 days ago

Or you go to jail

cyanydeez3• 17 days ago

better: "Claude, please search https://www.uspto.gov/patents/search/patent-public-search for a patent that made a lot of money and has obvious traits we can slightly tweak to get anothr patent; do this for each patent, then write patent application for each"

maxignol• 18 days ago

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

jonplackett2• 18 days ago

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

handfuloflight4• 18 days ago

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

defrost• 18 days 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.

helloplanets2• 18 days 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.

handfuloflight4• 18 days ago

I guess this is what is meant by AI psychosis?

helloplanets2• 18 days ago

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

WithinReason• 18 days ago

Page generated by Gemini I would guess

alex7o• 18 days 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 ```

dep_b• 17 days ago

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

OJFord2• 17 days 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?

cyanydeez3• 17 days 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

OJFord2• 17 days 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.

mapontosevenths• 17 days ago

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

tritondev• 17 days 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...

Mouse: Precision Editing Tools for AI Coding Agents

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