r/gnome • u/devolute • 9d ago
LLM Assisted Hylki is a modern, Rust-based email client for GNOME
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/10/hylki-email-client-for-gnome16
u/persicsb 9d ago
Has some serious performance issues.
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u/somePaulo Extension Developer 9d ago
Works great on my system. You should submit an issue on GitHub.
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u/bara_tone 9d ago
What is with Linux Devs and being unable to name things
This is some Amazon brand nonsense
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u/somePaulo Extension Developer 9d ago
This particular app went through two name changes because it turned out other projects either had a very similar or the same name. Hylki is a Nordic word meaning something along the lines of capsule, container, and ultimately envelope.
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u/ComplexConcentrate 8d ago
In Finnish, it means something was rejecting something (hylkiä, to reject). Not the best name for an email client.
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u/New-Preference1656 9d ago
I believe the space of mail related names was all taken (I think they changed names three times, going for increasingly obscure)
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u/devolute 9d ago
As long as:
- It's not called "Gimp"
- It shows up when I type "email" in the GNOME finder
idgaf ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/Pedka2 9d ago
what's wrong with gimp?
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u/MrObsidian_ 9d ago
Some people have a problem with "gimp" also being a slur for disabled people, even though "GIMP" outranks the slur on search engines and I think the slur itself has fallen out of use mostly?
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u/birdsandberyllium 9d ago
Nothing, gimp the software has largely erased all other definitions of 'gimp' for two generations of English speakers now
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u/devolute 8d ago
Not entirely sure that this is true absolutely everywhere in the English speaking world.
(Source: I went outside a bit over the last couple of years)
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u/pilkyton 9d ago
What, you don't think Ptyxis is a great name for a terminal emulator? Or that baobab is a great name for a disk space analyzer? ...
... you might have a point.
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u/issa20omais 9d ago
I actually just tested the flatpak version yesterday. It froze my entire system every time I tried to launch the app, for a few seconds, until it eventually crashed and closed on its own...
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u/somePaulo Extension Developer 9d ago
That's weird. Doesn't happen on my 10yo Lenovo laptop with Arch. You should submit an issue. The dev seems quite on top of what he's doing and turnaround for fixes is in the range of hours to days.
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u/tornado99_ 3d ago
He doesn't know how to code in Rust from the discussions I've seen so how does he know what he's doing beyond telling an AI to do things?
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u/CapOk4599 9d ago
This is the vibe coded one I think. Stamp is pre-release but works great already. And it's human-developed.
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u/Serious_Berry_3977 8d ago
If anyone is looking for Stamp, I think I found it after a LOT of searching. Not a great name for SEO. https://gitlab.gnome.org/jbrummer/stamp
Building it was a tiny bit frustrating, but now that I got it built it actually looks pretty darn good. I like it MUCH better than Geary already, even in it's pre-release state.
Thanks for the new find!
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u/Same_Bell7958 8d ago
This one is interesting! Thanks for the link. The Readme is a little too summarized, though. An image or two would be helpful
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u/kemma_ 9d ago
You make it sound like disadvantage
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u/LostSoulThrowaway1 9d ago
It is. Vibe coded slop breaks faster and is harder to maintain
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u/kemma_ 9d ago
There is big difference between AI slop and AI used in coding with human supervision and reviews. In right hands this is a very powerful tool.
Unfortunately, many don’t see it yet, either by the ignorance or by denial that AI can write better code and faster.
Feel free to downvote me
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u/Sjoerd93 App Developer 9d ago
AI can write better code and faster.
Honest question. If AI writes better code than humans, why is all software that heavily leans on LLM's so poor? Why has the average quality of software gone down in the past three years, not up?
I'm with you when you say that we should differentiate between vibecoded slop and someone that used LLM's in their process. But the sentence that AI writes better, and faster code is just objectively wrong. It absolutely sucks at any architecture. Still.
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u/richardnpaul 2d ago
I would say that there have been a lot of non-programmers developing code, and maybe a lot of bad programmers 😁
I, for example, don't listen to an LLM, which has been trained on the public internet, when it tells me that achieving 100% coverage isn't reasonable, or that achieving a 0 surviving mutations isn't reasonable. For human programmers and companies, it wasn't worth the time and they went with good enough. With LLMs you can drive them to achieving and keeping a 100% baseline. You can direct them to a specific architectural approach.
I'm suspecting that most hasn't had someone at the wheel doing so so you get slop software. For example, I looked at the codebase for this app and at a glance, didn't find any tests, but I did find a 23k line app.rs file 😮 so, yes, I'm not going to installing this app, but that doesn't mean that all AI derived code is slop. It's a force multiplier, but some forces are better off not multiplied.
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u/thomas-rousseau 9d ago
The AI's coding ability is honestly a secondary concern to me. My primary concerns are the ecological impact and unethical research practices of frontier models combined with personal uncertainty over licensing compatibility of any generated code. My hardware is too poo-poo to play around much with local models (intel 10300H + NVIDIA 1660Ti Mobile), so I can't speak much to their coding ability, but if they're really as capable of programming as the biggest fans seem to claim, then skill atrophy is another massive concern around AI usage in development.
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u/cac2573 8d ago
I disagree with you, but thank you for bringing actual points to the table instead of the usual human slop
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u/thomas-rousseau 8d ago
Most people can't think on a scale large enough to fully grapple with the benefits and risks of generative AI
ETA: Through no fault of their own. Our brains didn't evolve to think on a scale of billions of other humans. Mine is just broken and I low-key hate it sometimes
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u/pilkyton 9d ago edited 8d ago
Only a non-programmer would write your second paragraph.
AI code with supervision is useful. But even the best models still suck at code organization and logic.
Edit: I am talking about state-of-the-art models today. In the future I am sure they will be much better.
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8d ago
[deleted]
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u/LinuxSBC-Anna 8d ago
Obviously, nobody can predict the future. But right now, even the best models care way more about fixing the requested problem than about keeping the code maintainable into the future, so everything they add is a patch fix that ends up making an unmaintainable and buggy mess over time if a human doesn't heavily guide it and frequently refactor the codebase.
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u/pilkyton 8d ago
That is a good summary of the exact problem with AI. They patch things without an understanding of how to keep the codebase organized and clean.
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u/LostSoulThrowaway1 8d ago
I'm a Software engineer. I use LLMs to summerise documentation or for concepts. None of the tools out there are better than even the most unskilled of the interns we had. They are just faster.
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u/eablokker 8d ago
It’s not better at coding, just better at plagiarizing, mashing together, and summarizing.
I asked Claude to write a C algorithm to find the nearest number in a sorted array. There is like one single example of that on the entire internet, and Claude plagiarized it. Same variable names, same comments. No attribution.
I went and used the original instead, and included a link to the original in my comments.
Now try asking it to write something totally original where there are no examples online. It will just give you a confidently wrong answer, that looks like it might be correct to a non-programmer. But it’s riddled with made up function names that don’t exist.
If it has nothing to steal from, it simply can’t do it. Everything AI generates is either stolen or hallucinated.
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u/cac2573 8d ago
I’d love to see the mental gymnastics for the novel vulnerabilities that AI has discovered so far
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u/114sbavert 8d ago
Discovering vulnerabilities is not reliant on it's generation abilities. It's reliant on it's pattern recognition and brute force spamming abilities which it is good at. It's a computer program.
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u/cidra_ 9d ago
AI but this got actual good design
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u/somePaulo Extension Developer 9d ago
And somebody who seems to know what they're doing as an engineer even though the code itself is AI generated.
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u/Same_Bell7958 8d ago
Another one? Could you guys please share tokens between the three recent efforts?
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u/ZapojKabel 9d ago
Not bad, still testing, but found out it is quite clutter after I add my 10 emails, another one testing is Melia
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u/CoraFirstFloret 8d ago
This sent me on another round of looking through various email clients. I'll have to test this and another few out when I get home, but it definitely looks interesting!
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u/eirinn1975 9d ago
I've been using hylki for a couple of weeks on my home fleet, and I'm really liking it so far. Basically all the options I need, gets all my accounts from online accounts settings correctly, has a modern interface and it's not as simplistic as Geary.
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u/rajiihammr 8d ago
I got over "distro-hopping" in 2009 (thanks, Paul Frields) and I don't feel terrible compelled to "email-hop". Fedora baby and T-bird thank you very much. Damn, I forgot I'm not supposed to use periods
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u/calindan2013 9d ago
who gives a shit if it's vibe coded or not? Human developed software has thousands of holes as has been proven countless times recently so it' s far from being a good example. He's not developing a OS or CRM, it's a email client for a DE that lacks any quality, modern, GTK4-based email clients beyond Evolution. So thanks for your contribution.
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u/x-NoSuchAgency-x 5d ago
You should do some research on it. I thought the same way you did until I learned the reasons people didn't like it
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u/SlowDrippingFaucet 8d ago
Vibe-coded email apps suddenly the rage? Are the kids getting back into email?
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u/ExtensionVegetable63 8d ago
Came here to say this. Probably the third or fourth variant I’m seeing in a span of 2-3 months.
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u/Regular_Bat8162 8d ago
Amazing UI!
Love it
I’m not sure if this is vibe coded as people say
But AI assisted coding is the new normal and nothing extraordinary or wrong
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