It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

I’ve been doing Vim + aider, and now Claude Code. Those tools I understood. I never got into Cursor because I’m too old to give up Vim.

Clawd.bot really annoyed me at first. The setup is super tedious and broken and not fun. That’s mostly because I’m too impatient to tinker like I used to.

However, once you tinker, it’s so-so. I don’t think it’s a lot better than Claude Code or anything, but I think it’s just a focused vector for the same AI model, one focused on being your personal assistant. It’s like Claude Code vs. Claude Cowork. They’re the same thing. But given the low cost of creating custom tools, why not give people something that Clawd.bot that gives them focused guardrails?

Anyway, I could end up abandoning all of this too. And it’s all a kludge around things that should really be an API. But I do like that I can run it on my Mac Mini and have it control my desktop. It’ll be a cold day if I let it message for me; I’d rather it write deterministic code that does that, rather than do it directly.

> Why even bother?

Claude-code is closed-source. That is a good enough reason to look at alternatives.

I’ve installed and tested Clawdbot twice and uninstalled it. I see no reason to use this unless it’s with local models. I can do everything Clawdbot can do with Claude Code innately and with less tokens. I found Clawdbot to be rather token inefficient even with Claude max subscription. 14k tokens just to initialize and another 1000 per interaction round even with short questions like, “Hey”. Another concern is there are no guarantees that Anthropic isn’t going to lock down Oauth usage with your Max account like they did with OpenCode.

18gb RAM it is a bit tight

with 32gb RAM:

qwen3-coder and glm 4.7 flash are both impressive 30b parameter models

not on the level of gpt 5.2 codex but small enough to run locally (w/ 32gb RAM 4bit quantized) and quite capable

but it is just a matter of time I think until we get quite capable coding models that will be able to run with less RAM

Counterpoint: on the $20 monthly account I would hit my 5 hour limits within an hour on antigravity. I end up spending half my time managing my context and keeping conversations short.

It's about not polluting the context. AI doesn't need information about things that didn't work in the new requests' context.

Usually, I tell the agent to try out an idea and if I don't like the implementation or approach I want to undo the code changes. Then I start again, feeding it more information so it can execute a different idea or the same one with a better plan. This also helps the context window small.

What I really want from Codex is checkpoints ala Copilot. There are a couple of issues [0][1] opened about on GitHub, but it doesn't seem a priority for the team.

[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2788

[1] https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/3585