Cascade Chat

Details

External ID

48908099

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

Cascade Chat

Website domain

github.com

Launched

July 14, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

8

Upvotes percentile

0.46176821983273597

Tags

—

Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hello HN! I'm Matt and today I'd like to show you Cascade Chat.One of my earliest internet experiences was with mIRC. I always admired its straightforward, pleasant UI and the way it wove a hackable core into the code. The way you could build on the visual and API layers of the underlying IRC client to me was fascinating software machinery. It was truly a client that you could build on top of.As my career has progressed, I moved away from Windows and adopted Linux as my daily driver. That was where I found HexChat, the closest thing I could find to mIRC many years later. While I really enjoyed HexChat, it wasn't quite what mIRC offered. I eventually found myself on macOS with no clear analogue to either. That's why I built Cascade Chat.Cascade is a modern IRCv3 client. It supports persistent local history with full-text search, network management, replies, typing indicators, link previews, pinned messages, native notifications, SASL authentication, server-time, chathistory, account and away tracking, and the ratified IRCv3 capability set.I also wanted Cascade to be hackable, so I built in two fundamentally different layers:- Scripting powered by Go scripts for personal automation, event handlers, and timers. Scripts run in-process with no access to the standard library, filesystem, or network. - Plugins that communicate over JSON-RPC and can be written in any language as external processes.Stack-wise, it's a Go application built on top of Wails v3, which leverages the OS's native WebView to render modern web tech frontends as desktop applications. The result is an Electron-like experience without packaging a separate Chromium runtime.Full disclosure, since this is HN: I built Cascade using agentic engineering. I made the product and UX decisions, designed the architecture and code interfaces, and I reviewed and dogfooded the resulting work. Coding agents implemented much of the space between those decisions.To further ensure consistent quality, I built gates around that process rather than treating generated code as finished. I focused on unit and integration tests, full-stack end-to-end tests against a real IRCv3 server (Ergo), automated release candidates, and regular dogfooding of the prerelease channel.Cascade is open source under the BSD 3-Clause license. Prebuilt packages are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The current builds are unsigned, so macOS and Windows require a first-run confirmation step that I've documented in the README.I'd love to know if you'd make Cascade your daily IRC client, and if not, what that'd take! Feedback and PRs welcome.

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