Ghost Writer
Rhino Grasshopper Plugin For Seamless Agentic Coding
Year
2026
My Role
Software Development, Computational Design
Most attempts bolt AI agents onto the Grasshopper canvas — having the agent wire up components the way a person would. Ghost Writer takes the opposite bet: an AI agent is at its best when it does what it's genuinely great at, which is writing code. So instead of teaching an agent to drag nodes around, Ghost Writer turns a Grasshopper component into a small coding project and opens it in a real IDE — Visual Studio Code, Cursor, Rider, or PyCharm — where both you and your AI assistant already know how to work. The component stays live-wired to the canvas: edit the script, save, and Grasshopper recomputes instantly. The result feels less like fighting a cramped script box and more like designing with a full software studio at your back.
The everyday win is friction removed. Ghost Writer collapses that shuttling between external AI interfaces and Grasshopper: the agent lives inside the same editor as your script, sees the component's real inputs, outputs, and errors, and can even look at the geometry it just generated — so it iterates against reality instead of guessing. The method signature simply becomes the component's interface, so adding an input is a line of code, not a chore, and the whole definition travels self-contained inside the Grasshopper file.
A Grasshopper component that lives in your IDE.
Drop a Ghost Writer component on the canvas. It opens a real .cs or .py file in your IDE. Save the file and Grasshopper re-solves. The function signature is the component's inputs and outputs.
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Live param sync. Edit the signature, the component's I/O updates.
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Real IDE features. IntelliSense, refactor, debug, your AI extension.
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AI-agent ready. Agents read a compact JSON snapshot of inputs, outputs, and geometry.
Edit. Save. The canvas catches up.
Watch a parameter signature change in VS Code rewire the component and re-solve geometry in Rhino — in real time.
Live param sync
Edit the function signature, the component's inputs and outputs follow on save.
Your IDE, all of it
IntelliSense, refactor, debug, AI extensions — Ghost Writer doesn't replace your editor, it hands you the canvas.
C# & Python
One plugin, both languages, the same workflow. Roslyn for C#, Python.NET for Python
AI-agent readable
The component writes a compact JSON snapshot of real Grasshopper values and geometry. Agents debug what the canvas actually saw. Agent can also request exact screenshot of the output through CLI command.
NuGet & pip, native
dotnet add package in C#, imports auto-generate requirements.txt for Python. Dependencies just work.
Saves with the .gh file
Your code and project files serialize into the Grasshopper file. Share one .gh, ship the work. .ghvscodeignore excludes the noise.
