2025-08-15: Humbug updates

Published: 2025-08-15

Notes on Humbug development including using the AI backend for stand-alone applications and various UI improvements and bug fixes.

Using Humbug's AI backend for stand-alone applications

A month or two back, I refactored the AI backend and AI tools support and put them into separate top-level packages within the codebase. The idea was to make it easy to reuse these in other projects.

Today I started building just such a project (but it's not open source so I won't be writing about what it does here). Claude Sonnet 4 was able to read the code and build exactly what I needed with very little effort. That code worked very well! I suspect we need to start thinking about writing API docs for LLMs rather than people. People can always have the LLM explain it to them if they want to know.

I did realize the conversation transcript code should have been broken out at the same time I did that original refactor, so fixed that by doing it now.

Humbug UI improvements

Did lots of small UI improvements and bug fixes. Nothing particularly major, although got a nice 140 line net code reduction by eliminating a custom dialog with a MessageBox use. MessageBox now handles text sizing in a way that made the custom dialog unecessary.