On the other, the trend seems to be everyone developing a million disparate tools that largely replicate the same functionality with the primary variation being greater-or-lesser lock-in to a particular set of services.
This is about the third tool this week I've taken a quick look at and thought "I don't see what this offers me that I don't already have with Roo, except only using Claude."
We're going to have to hit a collapse and consolidation cycle eventually, here. There's absolutely room for multiple options to thrive, but most of what I've seen lately has been "reimplement more or less the same thing in a slightly different wrapper."
1. Real-time sync of CLI coding agent state to your phone. Granted this doesn't give you any new coding capabilities, you won't be making any different changes from your phone. And I would still chose to make a code change on my computer. But the fact that it's only slightly worse (you just wish you had a bigger screen) is still an innovation. Making Claude Code usable from anywhere changes when you can work, even if it doesn't change what you can do. I wrote a post trying to explain why this matters in practice. https://happy.engineering/docs/features/real-time-sync/
2. Another contributor is experimenting with a separate voice agent in between you and Claude Code. I've found it usable and maybe even nice? The voice agent acts like a buffer to collect and compact half backed think out loud ideas into slightly better commands for Claude Code. Another contributor wrote a blog post about why voice coding on your phone while out of the house is useful. They explained it better than I can. https://happy.engineering/docs/features/voice-coding-with-cl...
Which is super cool. Like during the dawn of web 2.0 we had lots of aggregators and forums instead of "Reddit and others."
(I'm not saying it's good UX.)
My complaint is more that right now it feels like everybody is rushing to fill the exact same space with the exact same feature sets.
It's resulting in a lot of superficial diversity that's functionally homogenous. I want to see more applications that are pushing the capabilities of current AI tooling in creative directions.
So, in other words, this is the exact opposite? “Lost of aggregators and forums” meant diversity. Lots of small players doing their own thing. What we have now is a handful of big players, and then tons of small players accessing those services with a different coat of paint. It’s like if the web you mention consisted of lots of people doing alternative interfaces to access Facebook and Reddit.
If there's no particular feature that only Claude offers, this is just needless vendor lock-in. And what happens if another lab releases a model that suddenly trounces Claude at coding? Your users will leave for an app that supports the new hotness, and you won't be able to keep them because of a short-sighted architecture that cannot swap model providers.
I built some workflows using Claude’s API and now wish I had used a wrapper so I could easily switch to try gpt-5 for the cost savings.
Wrappers constantly live in the support and feature parity of today.
Anthropic’s Claude Code will look a hell of a lot different a year from now, probably more like an OS for developers and Claude Agent non-tech. Regardless they are eating the stack.
Pricing/usage will be very simple - a fixed subscription and we will no longer know the tokenomics because the provider will have greatly abstracted and optimized the cost per token, favoring a model that they can optimize margin against a fixed revenue floor.
Personally, I think it's far more likely that a year from now either SotA models will have shifted elsewhere or Anthropic will have changed their pricing model to something less favorable than the current MAX plans. Either of those scenarios could suddenly result in the current Claude subscription models either not existing or no longer being the screaming deal they are now. I think it's exceedingly unlikely we see any major provider go to an unmetered business model any time soon.
And if you've built your entire workflow around tooling specific to Anthropic's services, suddenly you have an even bigger problem than just switching to a more cost effective provider. That's one of the bigger reasons I'm very skeptical of these wrappers around CC generally.
Even Claude Code itself isn't doing anything that couldn't and hasn't been done by other tools other than being tied to a really cheap way to use Claude.
Training is capital-intensive, yes, but so far it appears that there will always be some entities willing to train models and release them for free. All it takes is a slowdown at the frontier for the open models to catch up.
The money is in the hardware, not the software.
So depending on the parent company, they may prefer to have a - to be a little enterprisey - set of ISVs that are better in specifc domains.
This is definitely not how most compute-constrained cloud services end up looking. Your cloud storage provider doesn't charge you a flat rate for 5tb/month of storage, and no amount of financier economics can get Claude there either.
How many ways can you wrap (multiple agents, worktrees, file manager, diff viewer, accept reject loops, preset specifications for agents) -- let's try Electron! Let's try Tauri! Let's try a different TUI!
What if we sat down and really thought about how these agentic IDEs should feel first instead of copy pasting the ideas to get something out to acquire market and mind share? That's significantly harder, and more worthwhile.
That's how these agentic front ends should be advertised: "Claude Code, plus _our special feature_" and then one can immediately see if the software is filled or devoid of interesting ideas.
There are already a plugins to use claude code in other IDEs.
This “Ill write a whole IDE because you get the best UX” seems like its a bit of a fallacy.
There are lots of ways you could do that.
A standalone application is just convenient for your business/startup/cross sell/whatever.
Because I mentioned it and it's what I use daily: Roo is a VSCode extension. So you get the entire VSCode ecosystem for free. On the AI specific side, it has every feature this app highlights on its homepage and more. It works with just about any API provider and model you could ask for.
I could probably translate my existing workflow over to Claudia pretty easily, but what does that get me? A slightly different interface seems to be about it.
That's the question I keep hitting with these new tool announcements.
Continue.dev has some features, but it’s on VSCode and Jetbrains
That said, VSCode is a popular platform for this for exactly the reason I think consolidation is eventually inevitable: it's got a huge preexisting ecosystem. There are extensions for practically anything you could ask for.
There's likely room for some standalone, focused apps in this space. I just don't see the current wave of "we put a wrapper around Claude Code and gave it some basic MCP and custom prompt management tools like a dozen other applications this week" being sustainable.
They're all going to end up on their own tiny islands unless there's a reason for an ecosystem to develop around them.
you give up one side of freedom (the ide) for the other (the backend).
> I don't see what this offers me that I don't already have with Roo
Ironic >-< for an AI tool tied to a specific IDE
Lots of competing actors doing lots of similar things with confusing comparisons and quantifiable results.
But long story short she showed me what she had on her iphone and it was a totally different app that wrapped a text chat interface around chatgpt, it wasn’t even themed like to be a persona or anything but was at the expense of any multimodal capabilities
Just caught me off guard about how common that might be
Seems pretty scammy to me, akin to typo squatting with potential to collect a lot more personal information but he can’t always be reasoned with.
Hopefully he heeds my advice to not provide anything personal.
By the way, I did not wait for the Claudia demo to load, I was on the website for like 10 seconds, still did not load so... okay then.
All the more reason to embrace a fully open source stack. We need to go hard on "lesser".
- Happy Claude Code Client: open source (MIT) effort for a quality mobile app
- Omnara: closed source mobile app, $9/month
- CodeRemote: closed source mobile app, $49/month
- Kisuke: closed source mobile app, private beta, unknown price
If you know of others, I would appreciate a PR to update the table I put together, or just let me know and I'll add it.
https://happy.engineering/docs/comparisons/alternatives/#qui...
There are more more desktop apps, probably because those are easier to design.
* IR: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/registerIR?AKZ=1...
* EU: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/registerHABM?AKZ...
Edit: And the "getAsterisk" organization at https://github.com/getAsterisk/claudia and https://asterisk.so/ which is NOT about https://www.asterisk.org/. PSA: The real Asterisk has class 42: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/registerIR?AKZ=9... - Oh boy. What next? Call the next project TheRealMircosoftGoogle? Why not? Lol.
It wasn't great.
- Installation using the provided binaries just fails on my machine - I have Ubuntu 22.04, which apparently has too old a version of glibc. Building from sourced worked though.
- Every time I want to open a new chat, it brings me back to the project list. I don't want to click on the same project every time!
- Scrolling is awful! It's slow, and it often doesn't automatically scroll down as the chat is generated so you have to do it yourself.
- There's no title or anything across sessions. If I'm now working on multiple things at the same time, I want to know what I'm working on quickly!
- The log/text entries take up so much space. Something like this would benefit from a much more compact view - it shouldn't use my entire screen to show me 1 TODO list and 1 tool use.
- Unlike the video, the code changes are all wrapped in a "AI Summary" entry which tells me what it did in a few words, with no option (that I could find) to open the code itself. Confused, couldn't find a setting for this.
- There's multiple UI bugs, and it's sluggish overall.
I didn't use the Agents stuff, which (given the video starts with it) might be the main focus? But as it stands, for my attempt at running multiple Claude Code sessions at once, this was too buggy to really work. Someone else mentioned https://conductor.build/, which might be more what I'm looking for, but unfortunately it lacks Linux support.
I hope it gets better! I could see myself using it after a few more releases, and I'm rooting for them - just sharing my experience here for others who are considering trying it.
I'm not as tied to the cli as other folks here, but even I found the Claude Code cli to be a better experience than this too.
I think it will improve, but for now I'm sticking with the cli.
I wonder if I'll have to rename at some point.
As others have said, this is a giant red flag.
I am not saying it's infringement, I am just saying that my dumb brain made that connection and I feel like it's not unreasonable to assume that other people might as well.
For once reading the comments first has paid off!
Same reason you can't release a handheld console called the Gamegirl, or a voice assistant called Alexis.
Step 2: Turn around and sell security-as-a-service to the most profitable products
CC development is not just development, not all types of development. it’s frontend JS based , and it’s backend development. Only those scenarios work.
Try creating native desktop or mobile app and it’s like a swamp of trial and error.
You have to learn by trial and error what documentation sets and instructions you have to provide at which moment and context and balance at with token cost.. it’s a multi dimensional problem for which there are no recipes that work.
On top of that your direct instructions to not use particular patterns or approaches gets forgotten and ignored y CC with later “you’re right, I should have…”. I am starting to think it’s not solvable by the user by providing docs, examples and instructions. That Claude must have native development baked in to the same level as they baked in the frontend and backend.
What I am getting to is - make a tool to manage those doc sets and contexts and instructions and allow to share those sets between users globally as recipes.
> Try creating native desktop or mobile app and it’s like a swamp of trial and error.
I had it build an Android app and embedded code for a BLE peripheral at the same time, tailing the logs from each to debug issues. It worked great.
I generally avoid stating in concrete terms what Claude Code “can’t” do. Especially since it keeps getting new built-in features (like the ability to background shell processes and then tail their logs later) that often fix issues people talk about having had a month ago.
It already worries me that the Cursor agents occasionally try to perform operations with full absolute paths, which they wouldn't be able to know if they were properly sandboxed to the current directory.
In a way this is probably the future state - 1000 different clients for 1000 different people, each fully customized to their taste
Still miss Apollo
like a precursor to reddit's own API pricing changes that made it hard for 3rd party clients to compete.
The saving grace with these API wrappers is that local models being a thing can still let them hedge against the underlying AI labs eating up their stack.
Tweetdeck came out as the leader over the rest (mainly due to having actual functionality), and about a year after it was the clear victor (2011) twitter acquired them, and slowly integrated them into twitter properly (though they killed a bunch of features along the way intentionally).
Fast forward to the musk takeover, and twitter's API pricing changed such that making a third-party client is infeasible.
I think a lot of the same is likely to apply here.
It's a winner-takes-all market, there's a bunch of people iterating on form and ignoring function, and the winner will be based more on function than form.
If there's a clear winner on function, one of the AI companies can acquire and integrate it.
At most, I've been thinking about installing one of the extensions to integrate Claude Code into (neo)vim, but even that I'm not sure I really want or need.
But for people who arm themselves to the teeth with GUIs and IDEs, I guess I can see the appeal.
What I want at the core is to be able to open up access to my laptop's currently running Claude Code instance (without all these hacky backdoors that fork the chat with every message by using `--print`; I want a first class API that lets me append messages to the current chat), then I want to be able to send messages (with voice transcription) and approve/deny permissions and see the code diffs and all of that.
Maybe something like a Telegram bot? I had hopes for Claude Code UI[1] but the web interface is too clunky on mobile.
My phone also can build and run many projects on its own so I often don't even connect to the laptop.
(Not to mention that if I only have my phone, I'm probably out doing something where I don't want to be working...)
(Super rapid zooming in and out, flying all over screen at 3x speed, must cover eyes!!)
Extreme close-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxsWw_gV3E
Made something? Dont start with a long, protracted "This is how i built it from step 1". Show the damn thing! Then tell me how you built which i will be interested in only if the product is good to begin with.
1. https://github.com/anthropics/devcontainer-features 2. shameless plug, my own open-source CLI for doing this: https://github.com/smithclay/claudetainer
I think it's another workflow, that might suit your needs, but I think the real magic continues to be in the model. Similarly, I'm sure Claudia adds some nice window dressing.
Eventually folks will settle in on some local maxima for interaction and software development with LLMs. Who know what it will look like? It'd be nice if whatever comes next bumps the industry out of the current scrum and sprint style workflows, if only to break folks out of the theatrics of these software personas and rituals.
Here's my WIP: https://github.com/astral-drama/filter
There is an outstanding feature request around it at least:
I don't want to install a tool like this that isn't made by Anthropic.
I, too, find this confusing and actively dislike the naming and association here.
What people do care about is where names imply some relationship that isn't true. In this case the name Claudia strongly implies that this is an official Claude-related product. They'll get a cease and desist soon enough if this actually becomes popular.
I see a lot of commenters asking why a GUI is necessary. When you're running several agents in parallel it becomes very handy compared to the terminal. I can easily see the status of each which I haven't found a good equivalent for when using terminal tabs. Also it handles automatically creating git worktrees for each agent which is great.
You can tile terminals, you can use things like tmux to insert multiple command lines into one window, etc.
I’ve noticed these UIs tend to strip away native features (plan mode, sub-agents etc.). A thin layer that preserves Claude Code’s built-ins while orchestrating instances, worktrees, and branches from the shell would be ideal for me.
Question about Dashboard - I'm on subscription plan, and Dashboard shows - "Total Cost: $XX.YY". Is it somehow representitive towards how much credit I used in my plan, or it's just showing a costs it would take if I was using API instead?
Go play with it, but don't use for important chats already.
It works very fast compared to Cursor -- biggest limitation is that it doesn't have workspaces where you can get context from several repos for building your application.
MCP servers also work as well just a little more complex.
Then, when I create a new one, I tell Warp to use this folder as the boilerplate for the new one. It works perfectly.
Don't worry, someday you'll grow wiser and maybe you'll spend some time living as a CLI executable.
I’d really love to know what specifically about this is beautiful.
Steve Jobs says it and for 20+ years every tech bro parrots it mindlessly. “Oh do I think I did a good job on this? It must be beautifully designed.”
`Error: Problem parsing d="M 16.66% 50% L 83.33% 50%"`
Also saw this a couple months ago.
Yes, please :)
When I want to start an agent, I run a small command that takes in a prompt (and some optional flags but mostly the defaults are what I want). It does this: 1. Check out a worktree from a repo (defaults to my bread and butter repo with completions for the most active ~5 repos in my org) 2. Craft a command to launch an agent (supports codex, opencode, and gemini-cli because my company only gives us OpenAI keys). 3. Launch the command in a tmux session. 4. Exit 0.
There are some light integrations with Jira, GitHub, etc but they're accomplished by shelling out to other tools.
If I want to manage sessions, I've got tmux + fzf + other unixy tools old & new to manage them.
If I want to manage sessions remotely, there is vibetunnel. It would be cool to have a slicker AFK experience, but it works.
My silly little piece of vibe coded slop and duct tape, for my use case, is largely competitive with most of the offerings on the market, outside of the ones that do cloud-based environments. Some of these projects are VC funded teams of people working full time, I'm assuming. What a time to be alive.
I'm also amazed at how readily projects like this just embrace Claude Code lock-in. Is there really anything specific about it that other agent harnesses don't support? I haven't used it yet, but so far it just seems like it benefits in mindshare alone from being the default/first mover, not because it supports any particular feature the others do not. TBF I do hear that it is quite good.
Quality & polish is a compelling reason to _use_ something, but it's not a compelling reason to build walls IMO, especially in a space like this where context engineering techniques, prompts, etc are in no way secret sauce and can be readily copied.
LLMs are that, but claude code is not.
But yeah - I need to bounce between multiple OS so I avoid tools that don't run on all major desktop platforms.
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Magnet - The AI workspace for agentic coding
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You can think of Magnet as your workspace for collaborating with your human & AI agent team mates. We let you quickly spin up Claude Code sandboxes for every issue, and we're also thinking about how AI can be more of a thought partner in building high-quality software.
We're thinking about this problem space more broadly than just trying to be a GUI for Claude Code (though that's already a great starting point).
These are a few of the themes we think about:
- How can we use AI to help you think critically about the features you're prioritizing and what to build next?
- How can we always assemble and provide exactly the right context for every issue you're working on?
- What are the best patterns for collaborating with your human & AI teammates, to ship the highest quality code?
- How can you best specify exactly what you want, and verify that it's what you hoped for?
Would love for y'all to try it, and I'll post a video of me building a product with Magnet a little later here - the tool's getting really fun to use!
We're also very open to feedback and try to incorporate learnings quickly! I spent a large part of this weekend using Magnet to fix most of the issues someone we onboarded Friday brought up
