On the one hand, it's good that we're seeing a lot of exploration in this space.
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."
I've been contributing to an open source mobile app [1] that takes two swings at offering something that Roo does not have.
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...
This is awesome. I’ve tried several of the mobile setups and this worked like a charm without any fiddling.I’ve been using termius + tailscale but this is much better UX. Thanks!
To be clear: having a diversity of tools is a good thing! I like having options.
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.
> Like during the dawn of web 2.0 we had lots of aggregators and forums instead of "Reddit and others."
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.
I think the thing is that most of the people implementing stuff for Claude have already realized it’s just the best option available for… basically everything. I’ve switched to different models before, but I always come back to Sonnet or Opus for doing anything sensible.
Claude may be arguably the best model, but why decide unilaterally for your users that they _have_ to use it?
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 wonder if LLMs are actually closer to programming languages, in the sense of how they'll proliferate amongst different companies/people/use cases. Like maybe OpenAI is considered the Java of LLMs, while Claude is more like Python etc.
I've been using Codex in another tab in Terminal on Windows and it's my go to agent now. Just my two cents. I have a lot of hours with Claude Code, and do appreciate it, but Codex is quite good.
I'm finding GPT 5 (via Codex CLI on a pro subscription) is far better than Opus for my use cases. Much more than the small difference on swe-bench would suggest. However, the Codex CLI is so immature by comparison that I'm still mostly using Claude, and only escalating to Codex when Claude snookers itself.
And then the providers ship a landmark feature or overhaul themselves. Especially as their models advance.
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.
>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.
I'm more optimistic. Open source and open weights will eat this whole space.
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.
So I work at a company that sells a product that is part of a larger ecosystem. the parent company has spent 35 years NOT having a solution to our niche. There are others like us too in the space. Some do WMS, some do EDI, etc.
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.
> a fixed subscription and we will no longer know the tokenomics because the provider will have greatly abstracted
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.
There's few new ideas in this space, it's pretty boring.
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.
The idea here is an IDE for Claude Code specifically. is most likely the strongest coding agent right now, but not everyone loves the command line only interface. So I totally get it.
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.
If you're opposed to using VSCode for whatever reason, that's reasonable. Though, for me personally, the fact that it only lets you use Claude Code strikes me as a much larger negative on net. It's not at all agnostic in terms of AI provider.
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.
Yeah, it's absolutely a ('quick, sell shovels') gold rush. Too much that's the same and not enough big/different thinking, it'll take time, and as a buyer I'm not rushing in to buying too much of the early crap, personally.
As the code generation tools improve, this will only get worse. Having gen ai build a clone of something with some minor differences will become easier and easier.
I was with a fairly well acclimated woman the other day and mentioned something about chatgpt’s voice, she acted confused and asked if that was the paid version (it is)
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
My (somewhat elderly) father only refers to it as ChatGBT and when I tried to get to the bottom of why he said it’s because “thats what it’s called in my phone”.
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.
If the "on the go" experience is important to you, i.e. you actually want some care and intention put into the phone experience. There are 4 apps I'm aware of:
- 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.
Trademark action incoming in 3, 2, 1, ... and deservedly so. They even copied their graphic language. "Claudia" closely resembles "Claude," especially in the software/AI space.
Tried it out for a bit - recently upgraded to Max so was willing to try one of these run-stuff-in-parallel tools.
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 definitely thought this was an anthropic thing that they were trying to spin off into it's own website and app for normies.
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.
Same. But of course, I checked the GitHub first, and I really dislike this confusion. I don't trust someone with my AI tools that's acting like they are trying to trick me into giving them sensitive access. Nope.
The desktop companion is not the problem that needs to be solved. It seems that every developer who successfully used CC and go on to create some tool for it is doing it for the wrong reasons or because they have to do just something.
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.
> 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.
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's already a solved problem. Just use GPT-5-Thinking (or Pro) to create a highly detailed spec to execute against. You can also download the entire docs/source code for whatever libraries you're using and tell the AI to reference/search it as needed. Works great.
Does this sandbox the agents? All I want is a way to keep the agents from writing to and reading from arbitrary places on the filesystem. I want that enforced using operating system primitives rather than a pinky promise with an LLM.
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.
I think OpenAI's Codex does this. Not sure to what degree, but sandboxing seems to be a priority for that project. Possibly to their detriment since last time I tried it it was not nearly as good as Claude Code.
Codex-cli does use MacOS sandboxing by default. It does unfortunately cause issues for my workflow because the agent is very restricted in what it is allowed to do (like, read/write the Go build cache) and its command whitelisting configurability is currently nonexistent. I'm looking into using containers to allow the agent more autonomy within its environment.
You can solve this yourself with a little elbow grease with Docker + a devcontainer. I did this and I’m very happy with the results - Claude can do anything it wants, but it can’t push to prod.
I wrote https://github.com/anoek/sandbox for that exact purpose, it uses overlayfs to protect your system from LLMs making unwanted changes and optionally masks out places you don't want it to be able to read from.
You could try sandbox-exec. It’s kind of depreciated but was more or less designed for this exact use case I think. It’s too bad Apple doesn’t really support it anymore (although it still works in my limited testing!)
Too bad OSs have such lock-in. Having a macOS with great sandboxing per folder + os capability to avoid the docker hellscape would be awesome. Probably not gonna happen until we can oneshot an OS rewrite :)
didn't the underlying API they built upon ramp up their pricing and effectively price them out?
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.
Most of the clients were pretty bland and bad, made by Apple fanboys who believed that form was more important than function.
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.
I get that some people go that way, but to me, the fact that Claude Code is a standalone terminal app is a strength, not a weakness. I don't really want or need a GUI here. "From Terminal Chaos to Visual Clarity" doesn't resonate with me; terminals to me are simpler and more structured.
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.
I'm with you on desktop but I've been craving some sort of way to interact with Claude Code from my phone while I'm out and about.
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.
I have been using VibeTunnel from the iPad. Probably not good for a phone, but on a slightly larger screen it's great. The tailscale integration makes it super easy.
What's your use case / use need for this flow? Personally I really do not want to do this sort of thing from my phone. I just can't see "coding" from my phone as anything but clunky and unpleasant, even with an assistant.
(Not to mention that if I only have my phone, I'm probably out doing something where I don't want to be working...)
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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...
[1] https://github.com/slopus/happy
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.
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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.
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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".
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- 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.
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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.
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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.
1. https://github.com/siteboon/claudecodeui
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...)
https://omnara.com/