Goodbye Claude, hello Pi

> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay. Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous?

• TacticalCoder · 1 day ago

  >> Someone at Anthropic must’ve caught wind… just a day after making my decision, they announced Claude Code would finally start supporting AGENTS.md files in an effort to get me to stay. > Forgive me for asking if I should know, but who is the author? Is he famous? I think that was tongue in cheek. And by that I don't mean the author's tongue was actually in his cheek. I also think it went over your head. And by that I don't mean I think it literally went over your head.

  • cwnyth · 1 day ago

    It's clearly a joke, but I can forgive some people for taking it literally, given the impact that certain well-known devs have on other companies' decision-making. It's a common enough line that it's plausible this could have been a VIP whose opinions swayed a company. Not him and not Anthropic, of course, but it does happen.

    • derektank · 1 day ago

      I wouldn’t even say not Anthropic, Boris is soliciting recommendations for Claude Code right now in the secrets exposure thread. Hardly implausible

  • arcanemachiner · 1 day ago

    I can't believe you didn't pick up on the sarcasm in the GP's comment...

    • ozlikethewizard · 1 day ago

      While I agree the sarcasm is obvious, important to remember sarcasm doesnt really translate well if english is not your first language, and notoriously does not translate well online regardless, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

• bluerooibos · 1 day ago

  'Tis a joke. His landing page says he's a dev at Salesforce, so I presume not famous.

• karagenit · 1 day ago

  I’m definitely not famous :^) thanks for reading!

• wincy · 22 hours ago

  It’s not that unreasonable, or at least wasn’t a few years ago. I complained about the Chatgpt Pro $200 not allowing basically unlimited image generation (the limits were super low) a couple years ago and the next day Sam Altman tweeted asking about switching up how they handle Pro plans and putting usage into a single pool (which is what they moved to). If he didn’t read my email directly the gist at least got to him.

The whole AGENTS vs CLAUDE md issue was bound to be resolved. If the models are getting smarter and harnesses getting better - how could you have a product so dumb that it ignores whatever skills, instructions, references, other things that are part of the folder context it is mounted in. Having claude code ignore agents.md just made it seem dumb. At this point, you probably don't need either.

• arcanemachiner · 1 day ago

  > At this point, you probably don't need either. There's only so much stuff I have the patience to tell it in a session before I write it down somewhere.

  • margalabargala · 1 day ago

    "Write down the rules I told you in CLAUDE.md"

• upcoming-sesame · 7 hours ago

  Now they just need to solve MCP standardization across agents

Anecdotally I run semi nightly harness and local model test runs, and opencode consistently outperforms ohmypi on various code bench tasks. Note though that this for local models that can run on a 5090, so, kinda dumb models with a small context window. Also they might perform differently on a custom pi setup rather than the very feature rich ohmypi. Mostly the runs just cause me to get decision fatigue so I typically just use opencode and let a frontier model choose whatever cheaper models it wants to orchestrate with, so long as it's one that's not on the same token budget. P.S. I'd always wondered who it was that got caleb.software before I could... Outshot in a western duel!

• bdemirkir · 1 day ago

  Opencode's system prompt is much smaller than omp. Smaller models may not work well just because of this. Also omp is not pi.

• dofm · 1 day ago

  Alas Opencode's source is hideous to read. When you say "kinda dumb" it's worth noting that the smaller coding models tend not to actually need system prompts to be helpful coding assistants, etc. Qwen maybe more than Muse Glimmer? I've not tested Qwen 3.8 27B enough yet. Even Gemma 4 didn't seem to need much. Muse Glimmer is so absolutely tuned for one particular pattern (turn-by-turn agentic coding and assistance) that it will do it more or less without a prompt at all (except to set the reasoning level maybe). Beyond the tools announcement, it feels to me like it almost only needs a prompt to do plan mode stuff. If LM Studio (in either of its forms) or Unsloth Desktop had proper support for running inside a linux container rather than just a filesystem sandbox, you'd barely need a dedicated coding agent at all. Osaurus gets even closer. I wanted to like Opencode but I can't, really. I am enjoying Pi slightly more because it's just way less convoluted and obscure. FWIW I use Paseo for the GUI, which to some extent eliminates that aspect of decision fatigue; if you like Paseo's UI well enough, you can have it with almost any harness. And since it can connect to its daemon via ssh you can still have the desktop GUI with a container. (Not clear to me if Opencode v2 Desktop makes remote connections to the daemon or just wraps the web interface like v1 did)

  • load-bearing · 1 day ago

    I do not know how it is with Glimmer, but other Facebook models (Muse and whatever is currently hiding under "Crouton") sure love ignoring direct instructions to do or not do something important (like not using particular broken/inefficient tools). Doesn't matter if it's repeated ten times in screaming caps, they'll still ignore it at least sometimes. No other model I've used does this.

    • dofm · 17 hours ago

      It is often very determined to continue, so it's a little difficult to steer when it gets the bit between its teeth. The most peculiar thing is that it expects to be able to "read" directories? Harmless, so it fails, but it's a waste of a tool call. I am increasingly wondering about modifying Pi's read tool so it returns a directory listing in that context. I have had some difficulty getting it to have a nuanced understanding of how I want to manage git, but I am reaching the conclusion that it's me that needs to change there. Basically I don't think you can say "only commit when I ask you to" and then actually ask it to more than a couple of times in any session, because it will tend to then assume it can go ahead. Scaling the context up might help me a bit there. But apart from this, I really like it. I will test Qwen 3.8 27B properly at some point, (though judging by the insane, empty noise making campaign that is going on on social media, Qwen 4 is near)

• segmondy · 1 day ago

  ohmypi is not pi, it's based on pi, but it's not pi.

• karagenit · 5 hours ago

  Hah, I grabbed caleb.software way back in 2020. It’s cool and all but I kinda regret not just going with a traditional domain… you’d be surprised how many older sites reject .software as a TLD entirely when creating an account or whatever. Plus namecheap keeps jacking my prices up, $60 to renew this year so I’ll be transferring to cloudflare (still $30/yr, 3x what a .com would cost). I feel kinda locked in at this point but if I ever decide to give it up I’ll shoot you an email.

I get 150 tokens/sec on my coding agent, if you are on a MacBook, thats with an M1 try kapitsa as the inference engine with pi as the harness It works really well

• ohmahjong · 1 day ago

  Man, my M1 Pro unfortunately only has 16GB of RAM; it has been such a limiter to using local models. I'll give kapitsa a try, I see I should be able to squeeze some smaller models on

  • yieldcrv · 23 hours ago

    kapitsa is customized well to just a small selection of models that are in vogue right now, focusing on qwen and nemotron compared to llama.cpp that tries to cater to all but does so only averagely check the catalogue and see if one of the quantizations fit

> having a ton of CLAUDE.md files scattered about various GitHub hobby repos is great guerrilla marketing Their real marketing comes/came from https://github.com/claude phenomenon. Irrespective of what underlying model you are using the claude code harness just sticks this github user as git commit author and then you have to make an effort to remove it. That is just odd.

• senko · 20 hours ago

  Agreed that it's annoying by default, but it's quite easy to disable: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings-reference?ref=expla...

> It seems like there isn’t someone high-up whose job is strictly to say “no” to these requests, which is incredibly important when it comes to product engineering Ah, product management - we know so few of ye who know what you're doing.

Is using Codex through Pi allowed? I've been a Claude user, but a lot of the things mentioned bother me as well. I see it constantly make mistakes due to (simple) shell aliases, etc.. Not sure I'll actually switch but I'm curious. I've thought about trying to build my own harness and use Codex usage to work through it without spending a fortune on credits.

• sigttou · 1 day ago

  Yes, it is allowed and supported normally by pi and others.

• suoloordi · 1 day ago

  Yes, you can use your Codex subscription with Pi without any limitations. It supports Codex out of the box. You may need to install extensions for things like tracking usage and limit resets though. Pi only provides basic Codex integration.

• alexhans · 1 day ago

  Yes. You can and it's easy to test. I'd also encourage you to try local models with it as well. Pi/opencode apparently make 10% already of all traffic already: https://manifest.build/blog/chatgpt-plus-tokens-third-party-...

• judge2020 · 1 day ago

  Anthropic's subscription is the one that has historically been tough to use with other harnesses, where they have (had?) technical safeguards to ensure your subscription usage was limited to Claude Code CLI, with third party harnesses often implementing workarounds or faking it to use your Claude.ai subscription. Nowadays Jetbrains Air does officially allow using your Claude.ai subscription. But OpenAI's subscription has seemingly always been available to use in other harnesses without trouble.

• godelski · 1 day ago

  Yes and no. Any harness can use the subscription but must go through `claude -p` mode, which is more limited.

  • what · 23 hours ago

    Why do you need to use claude to use a codex subscription with pi?

    • qwerpy · 23 hours ago

      He assumed the original commenter meant claude, because Anthropic's the only provider that imposes the strict limitations on subscription use.

• nsingh2 · 1 day ago

  This, IMO, is one big selling point of Codex for me. The are much more accepting of usage outside of the Codex harness, and make it trivial to set up.

• PufPufPuf · 23 hours ago

  Using your subscription in 3rd party tools is explicitly allowed for Codex, and disallowed but not really enforced for Claude. There are extensions for Pi that allow you to log in with your Claude credentials, Codex is iirc even built-in.

• anewhnaccount2 · 23 hours ago

  There is no stick unlike Anthropic (along with insisting on signing commits and "don't abuse the robot" the reason I started to use OpenAI instead of Anthropic --- not that I am under the illusion they are any less evil overall) but I think now there is starting to be a carrot towards Codex usage since there sessions are "cached forever". I assume if you use Pi you get 12 hours of cache instead.

I mean... sure, yeah. But this feels like six weeks (or more) out-of-date. And so it is - from mid-September. And I know that observing such a thing sounds bizarre and teenage, but that's kind of a long time right now; we're at a moment in history when things are moving fast. We're not really fully ready for the traffic TBH, but for those who few of you choose to click, this is what we've been doing with pi lately: https://magenta.cryptograss.live/

• skybrian · 1 day ago

  Made me click, but I have no idea what this is supposed to be.

Pi has been my goto agent for several months now, the project is great and basically runs everywhere. If you like Pi, I suggest taking a look at Deepseek Harness too. For those using Claude, there's pi-claude-code[0] which is currently still the way to use Ant subs in Pi. [0] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi-claude-code

• rahimnathwani · 1 day ago

  Is that still needed now that Agent SDK usage is included in subscriptions? https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau... Update October 7, 2026: Claude Max, Ultra, and Team plans now include monthly API credits. They cover the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, and the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p when you run them with an API key from your linked Claude Console organization. Nothing changes for your plan: when you’re signed in with your Claude plan, the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits. EDIT: I was mistaken. pi uses @anthropic-ai/sdk (the client for the Messages API), not @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk (the Agent SDK).

  • giladd · 1 day ago

    Does Pi support that natively?

    • kristjansson · 1 day ago

      Yes, in the sense that Ant credits some number of dollars worth of API tokens to your account and Pi has long been happy to use an Ant API key

  • nsingh2 · 1 day ago

    The Agent SDK is using the Claude Code harness. The point of using Pi is to avoid using that harness entirely. It wouldn’t make sense to use the Agent SDK in Pi; you would essentially be driving a harness with another harness. If you’ve used Codex before, then the Agent SDK is Anthropic’s equivalent of the Codex App Server, which is Codex running headlessly with a protocol to talk to it.

• janpeuker · 15 hours ago

  I use pi.dev since it came out and love it - and pi-claude-code is a great help since Anthropic turned of subscription access. But I also see every day how Claude Code tries to lure me back and often refers to its own skills which then don't work properly eg when spawing sub agents or asking me to run certain commands. Dark TUI Patterns.

• elsoja · 13 hours ago

  dsh-claude-subscription provides a native interface in Deepseek Harness and works great https://github.com/apcamargo/dsh-claude-subscription

I think Anthropic is working on allowing AGENTS.md files as well. However, Claude.md files take precedence if present. If not, you fall back to AGENTS.md.

• SurfingAlpaca · 1 day ago

  Claude now supports AGENTS.md fully but the rest of what you said holds

  • bredren · 1 day ago

    It has since 9/16, however folks soon realized it supports AGENTS.md, but not .agents/skills. This is such an important detail the main issue for this was closed and then reopened with an expanded title: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/31005

> At the time of writing, there have been 244 releases to Claude Code this year; over 3/4 of these changed the system prompt or tool descriptions. ooof, that is a lot! And we're supposed to believe them and start one-shotting our projects...

• dannyw · 1 day ago

  Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts. For me personally, I don’t use Claude Code because I can’t read the source. At least with Codex, I know there’s a bunch of telemetry and all that, but I can have my agent inspect the source and have relatively greater confidence it’s not implanting spyware onto my machine, because a classifier thinks I’m working for Deepseek or something.

  • lifeisloving · 1 day ago

    They're hill climbing by changing their system prompt... That's not how thats done. They're changing system prompts to control how users use their llms.

  • oblio · 15 hours ago

    > Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts. Let's be real. If their tools were as amazing as they're touting, Claude Code would be a tight, hyper optimized Rust/Zig/FreePascal/whatever 3MB binary that would launch instantly, have no trouble scrolling text at lightning speed on its 20 platforms, etc, etc.

    • strangegecko · 19 minutes ago

      That's assuming they're optimizing for those things. The software industry hasn't cared about optimization for a long time. All they care about is how to capture profits and market share. The truth is that these optimizations don't do that.

Pi is awesome until compaction hits. I think one in every two compactions it’s failed on me ie didn’t know how to continue :(

• julianlam · 1 day ago

  Try pi-vcc or pi-blackhole

  • alfiedotwtf · 23 hours ago

    Thanks! I’ve taken a look at Blackhole before but it looks way to complicated for what I wanted. I’ll check out VCC. Thanks again!

  • alfiedotwtf · 17 hours ago

    Yes.. pi-vcc does what no other compaction extension has managed to do - work! Thank you!!

• esalman · 23 hours ago

  I never really rely on compaction. Instead, I instruct the coding agents to maintain a handoff markdown document across sessions. Ymmv.

  • alfiedotwtf · 23 hours ago

    What about if you’ve given a plan that will take hours? How do you tell how to auto-compact since it can’t read its own environment?

    • pseudony · 21 hours ago

      Cannot show now because Github times out for me, again. I had pi write me a ralph loop plugin. You plan with it, it breaks it down into tasks. Task success means clearing the context - if it runs out of context, it clears and starts on the same task again (code changes from previous run are left intact). Complete with little docker-like names for Ralph sessions and the ability to resume sessions should you need to. Point is, I would generally do this because it costs less context I think, and better tracks progress. Ping me if you are interested and want it. Otherwise, plenty around :)

      • machomaster · 20 hours ago

        Please share with me.

        • pseudony · 18 hours ago

          https://github.com/jwdevantier/ralphish :)

      • alfiedotwtf · 20 hours ago

        Hehe yes please. I’m not sure how it will go mixing it with Superpowers, but your workflow sounds really useful. I like that it can recover from zero.. especially when I overclock ram and then hangs

        • pseudony · 18 hours ago

          Hey, replying so it's easy for you to follow up on. https://github.com/jwdevantier/ralphish :) Remember, I didn't write a word of it - so if anything is not to your liking, it's no harder than pointing a model at it to fix it. One of the many powers of Pi is the way plugin- and API documentation is bundled in.

          • alfiedotwtf · 17 hours ago

            Nice. Thanks for the link :)

      • esalman · 12 hours ago

        I do something similar to this, but manually. I just ask Opus to break the implementation into phases, after each phase is complete it'll update the handoff document, and I'll review the work before starting the next phase in a new session. I actually started using Opus 5.5 2-3 weeks ago and I'm still having to adapt my workflow around it.

• pseudony · 21 hours ago

  Something is misconfigured on your end. I have had some trouble where parameters were incorrect, but otherwise I have used several vendors (local, openrouter, ollama cloud, kimi, deep seek) and it generally works. Most likely context length parameters aren’t set quite right for your model/provider and you genuinely run out of context during compaction

I've been daily driving Pi for over a month now and never looking back. The latest crop of frontier models have really complex bash calls, so I've written an extension that rewrites them into plain English while still making them easy to reveal in full, unlike some harnesses which seem to try to hide this from the user which is pretty irresponsible IMO.[0] [0] https://github.com/siraben/pi-tool-summaries

• lifeisloving · 1 day ago

  I just have a hook that tells agents to echo what they're trying to do. Works fine.

• someothherguyy · 23 hours ago

  alternatively, you could learn to read it

  • siraben · 15 hours ago

    The rewrite is configurably off for bash/tool calls below a certain line length. I would prefer not to read codegolfed bash and python for hours every day, personally.

• alex_duf · 20 hours ago

  I just have custom instructions to tell the model to edit files using its tools rather than a gigantic bash pipelines. That's 80% of it.

  • machomaster · 20 hours ago

    Would that be useful in other harnesses/models like Codex? Wouldn't that lead to increased token usage?

  • siraben · 15 hours ago

    I prefer not the fight the RL as the models get better, unless I've measured it and haven't observed any degradation. There may be other costs/no. of turns considerations too.

Switched to DeepSeek Harness recently, their new Creator Mode is amazing: https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/s/sxg7aAM6rS

• qwerpy · 1 day ago

  X link for people who don’t use Reddit: https://x.com/DeepSeekHarness/status/2117256196227019194

• DavCreator · 18 hours ago

  Ueddit link for those who don't want be tracked by Reddit: https://www.ueddit.com/r/DeepSeek/s/sxg7aAM6rS

Does Pi come with an auto mode that blocks dangerous actions? It didn't last time I checked, and these measures are critical to protect prod (and your personal files, etc) from a confused agent. I gave the harness a try and it is refreshing, but the insistence on staying bare bones and not implementing basic functionality natively, together with no vetting process for popular 3rd party modules, made me return to Claude Code.

• JoshTriplett · 1 day ago

  > bear bones *bare

  • giladd · 23 hours ago

    ty, edited

• bermudi · 1 day ago

  You have time to watch over your agents?

• wmedrano · 1 day ago

  You'd have to install an extension or write a function that intercepts tool calls.

• coldbrewed · 1 day ago

  gotgenes/pi-permission-system and the ai-guard authorizer can do a lot here, it feels very similar to cc auto mode. I built a policy authorizer on top of pi-permission-system that looks kinda like nftables that models commands/subcommands/options as read/write and enfores policies depending on if the sub agent is read only or write, which really cuts down on the stupid decisions and nicely complements AI cmd review. Pi shines for making things like that possible.

• jagrit · 23 hours ago

  like the auto mode classifier? if it doesn't then... that's a risky tradeoff

• agentdev001 · 23 hours ago

  Sounds to me like it isnt basic functionality if it all works ;)

• pkulak · 23 hours ago

  Well yeah, the whole point of pi is that you build it to your workflow. If you dislike the entire point of a project, it’s not for you. I run my agents in a sandbox. When Claude or Codex then double sandbox themselves, it gets really annoying.

• mpern · 22 hours ago

  I would not trust auto mode in the first place. Wrap your agent of choice in e.g. docker sandbox, nono.sh, Nvidia OpenShell, microsanbox or any other sandboxing tool and run it without any checks (i.e. "yolo mode", dangerously-skip-permissions etc.) IMHO it makes the whole category of problems around permission fatigue, trusting the harness (or plugin) authors etc go away.

  • giladd · 20 hours ago

    I did that. Customized Pi to run in Bubblewrap, made an action authorization flow, etc. But that's throwing the baby with the bathwater. This gives you a harmless, less capable agent. To get both safety and usefulness, Ant's solution of a fast classifier works really well.

    • mpern · 17 hours ago

      For me, its the other way around. Strong sandbox + disabling permission checks gives me maximum capabilities, least annoyance and (relative) peace of mind that any prompt injection, malicious plugin,... won't wreck my shit or leak credentials of any kind

    • mark_l_watson · 14 hours ago

      Using Bubblewrap is pretty good. However, I moved to using Apple Containers with one local file directory mounted; When the container is not running, I do git operations outside the container. This is simple, and although not as convenient as running naked with no isolation, it is light weight and easy.

• owlmusic · 21 hours ago

  I use https://pi.dev/packages/pi-warden with Jev (but can use other Decisions API), it would make sense to combine with pi-permission-system to get the CC two stage "default auto" mode.

• czottmann · 10 hours ago

  I wrote pi-automode for exactly that reason. Works well enough for me, YMMV. https://github.com/czottmann/pi-automode

I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop. VS Code has become a code review tool and place where I manage git if need be. The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, which makes history easier and cleaner to scroll through, also no scrolling bugs, rich text is easier to read with tables, and images integrated into the chat, resources like browsers in the context of the session. Drag and drop session organization (pins), scheduled tasks, etc.. all that in the side bar. Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable. With the GUI desktop app it's one app, and I can start sessions in an repo and switch between them easily, no need to open VS Code for each. I don't see what could make me want to go back to using a TUI. Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?

• nsingh2 · 1 day ago

  I just ended up making my own GUI. I never really liked any of the pre-build ones. It started slow (3-4 days of work) and grew organically around my working style. I can also have my preferred UX (e.g., high information density). Take a look at the Codex App Server or the Claude Agent SDK as a way to communicate with harnesses running headlessly and build your own UI on top. I’m sure Pi can be set up in a similar fashion.

  • vinhnx · 23 hours ago

    I've been building my own open-source coding agent, VT Code, in Rust. I wanted more control over the harness itself, especially tool execution, sandboxing, approvals, and context management. Recently built a native macOS app with GPUI on top of the same agent runloop. It's been interesting exploring how the same engine works across terminal and desktop workflows. https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode

  • bob1029 · 22 hours ago

    I did this for myself several times. I started with winforms and evolved into a full blown clone of ChatGPT.com experience built as a razor/MVC project in .NET10. I have 2 versions that are just for working on unity projects. One that is for working on the client project. There is also one that I refer to as the ring of power / Death Star that I keep mostly to myself. Eventually, the client saw what I was doing and decided they wanted a custom ChatGPT.com experience for the whole team, so I got paid to build the most recent one. Using AI to assist with the development of this stuff is the RSI you've been looking for. I'm in a situation where I was only able to solve a problem due to two levels of bootstrapping enabled by custom harnesses. The product the client uses cannot be "one shot" using the latest frontier tools. I had to build an ad-hoc agent loop fit for just that one purpose using another tool that was possible to build via copilot. For example, using copilot in VS over a unity project's scripts might as well be a drunk person throwing darts from a boat compared to a purpose built harness that can execute ad-hoc scripts in the editor environment as often as it pleases. The client's custom experience is better than ChatGPT.com in many important ways now. It certainly performs better. It will run on safari without doing horrific things to layout and my CPU. You can easily exceed the capabilities of the frontier AI companies in ways that are important if you use their tools cleverly. These companies are great at making AI models. Not harnesses, websites, apps, etc.

  • ilteris · 21 hours ago

    I have the same setup. All you need is a server hosted on your own machine and a few adapters to connect them to providers using ACP and various thin client all connected through tailnet. I have developed my own web and mobile applications with gemini live full duplex routing to opus my local projects and maintain the same session across any platform I choose, including Hermes. Building personal software is easy these days.

• drewnick · 1 day ago

  I thought the TUI was the ultimate power tool and loved the original embrace from claude code. I still use TUI a lot, but have been using deepseek harness web app atop my local model and am already liking the better organization and UI of this interface. I can see my load shifting to it. But you are right, you almost always need a VS Code interface open as well. The outputs of Opus 5.5 were so much easier to read, but I do find the the deepseek web based tool much easier to comprehend for some reason. Plus I can access it from phone (over tailscale) as well when out and about and continue sessions very easily. AND it is all open source/weights. I'm pretty thrilled, but it's been less than a week.

  • testaccount28 · 23 hours ago

    claude is a terminal-themed gui, not a tui.

    • brabel · 21 hours ago

      People seem to forge Claude has a very powerful GUI as well. I don’t get why most still seem to be using it in the terminal instead. A bit like emacs. The GUI is infinitely superior to use!

      • majorbugger · 19 hours ago

        because it's yet another potential attack surface

    • miki123211 · 20 hours ago

      I think this was a marketing play by ANthropic. Look, it's just a tool, you are a developer, you've used TUIs all your career, this is just one more TUI, no different than your beloved Vim or Emacs. No need to be scared, this won't replace you because mere mortals won't know what to do with a TUI, so you can use it freely and get more work done, just as you were always obsessed with doing when configuring your Vim bindings. Then, a year in, when everybody is hooked line and sinker, people start to understand that the TUI is the least important part of the whole thing, and the model and harness are what really matters.

    • oblio · 15 hours ago

      > claude is a terminal-themed gui, not a tui. It fits most definitions of a TUI, though. Just with lots of scrolling text. Don't confuse TUI with CLI.

  • marktl · 23 hours ago

    Claude Web app includes Claude code tab with remote option to work from your own machine (if preferred). I am using it very often. I have a project folder which is my default environment, and within it I have my many repo clones. That way I can work on any project from my prompt and reference elements in one project to include in another. I continue to get good results using lifeOS (though I don't use the entire setup) https://github.com/danielmiessler/LifeOS

    • drewnick · 8 hours ago

      Thank you for chiming in. I got all of this activated today and am liking it. Team GUI for me.

  • queenkjuul · 19 hours ago

    I've been using deepseek lately (just the chat interface on hobby stuff) and it's frankly better at searching the web and writes less like it's trying to bullshit its way through pretending to know what it's doing, i think it is just easier to understand. Unfortunately it also is more often wrong, or more often writes bugs, but i guess in a harness that's kinda mitigated -- it does usually find its earlier mistakes ime

    • badestrand · 18 hours ago

      And it's so fast! Claude often thinks for >60s which drives me insane for simple questions. Maybe it's also the configuration of the harness, but at least the web interface of Deepseek already has half a page written after a single second - a bliss!

• kristjansson · 23 hours ago

  I've lost faith in the ChatGPT desktop app. It's nicer than managing a bunch of TUI sessions, but it's so prone to losing session history / context.

  • walthamstow · 22 hours ago

    The MacOS one has a dreadful startup time as well. I can have the website open in ms but the app takes 7 or 8 seconds

• conception · 23 hours ago

  Herdr changed my tui game. Pi but for tmux.

  • aerhardt · 20 hours ago

    Yea me too. I also wnet GUI for a little bit until I discovered herdr.

  • Pxtl · 14 hours ago

    Can't you just run pi in normal tmux? Also tmux has the worst tui I've ever used.

• nikanj · 22 hours ago

  I’m using one iTerm to host the TUIs. The RAM cost is a tiny fraction of modern electron-based gui slop

• CarlitosHighway · 21 hours ago

  I dislike the harness TUIs for this for the same reasons. Nothing against TUI in general, the lazy* universe for example is great. OpenChamber (the desktop app, not the VSC extension) for OpenCode currently works best for me. Especially because of its seamless remote control via their iOS app.

• bluegatty · 21 hours ago

  ""GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, "" ? The GUI has nothing to do with that. If you use Chat / Work / Code <- that's the differentiation. So 'Code' in 'Gui' is identical to Claude Code except for the visual layout. If you use Work or Chat, which are not optimized for Coding you'll see a different experience. If you use iTerm or Ghostty and set a key combo to switch tabs you can very easily switch between tabs and the TUI generally gives more dense information. Usually people migrate to TUI not the other way around. I think that there are reasons to use GUI - if there is deeper integration with Git or an issue tracker - or - in VSCode - for navigating files etc. - definitely those things are valid. But for raw AI the getting a TUI to work the way you want it is ideal.

  • miki123211 · 20 hours ago

    I don't get why people love TUIs so much. They're basically GUIs made using inferior tools. Why hammer in a nail using your fist if you have a hammer handy? A GUI is strictly more powerful than a TUI (because a GUI could just show plain text in cases where that is the most appropriate mode of interaction, E.G. Bloomberg, AMadeus), but it could also do so much more in cases where it is not. I do love terminals, don't get me wrong. When what you're interacting with is CLIs and Unix tools in a shell, a terminal is exactly what you want. I do love the Unix philosophy, I like small and composable tools that you can use together, and I think the interactive way of working that a shell or REPL can give you is great (though notebooks would have been better, but that's beside the point). Those are things that the terminal shines at. Pretending to be a GUI is not one of those things.

    • cwaffles · 20 hours ago

      A couple of reasons 1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size) 2. Usable over the network (ssh) 3. Often much easier to drive with automation software (agents/scripts) 4. Ui tends to be dense, matches your font perferences

      • oblio · 15 hours ago

        > 1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size) Have you used Claude TUI? :-) > 3. Often much easier to drive with automation software (agents/scripts) TUIs? Not really. TUIs aren't composable, CLIs are. Now, many TUIs also have a separate CLI mode built-in, but guess what, many good GUIs also have a built-in CLI. TUIs are also frequently harder to automate via click-click than decent GUIs, since mature GUI toolkits tend to have built-in accessibility and I doubt anyone has ever programmed extra accesibility into any TUI in history, outside of the default keyboard access they get because they're inherently character driven (though that can take you quite far).

        • jameshart · 15 hours ago

          Many TUIs break even basic UI composability stuff like copy/paste; accessibility is even lower down the list.

    • estetlinus · 20 hours ago

      Are you saying I should go back to GUI? I just feel it’s so awkward. I have LazyVim for more advanced review, Hunk, etc… the GUI is like a inferior version of Eclipse IDE or something. Or it used to be, atleast.

      • LeBit · 18 hours ago

        I love the terminal. I live my life in the terminal. I use lazygit all the time. I integrate delta with it. But I use vscode GitLens for diffs. I always find the view port in lazygit to be too narrow. My feeble brain cannot work with so few context.

        • estetlinus · 16 hours ago

          You and me, bro. Look at this diff plugin for nvim, so pleasant. You’ll avoid vscode https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/3AyZ4NSBMz

    • solyin · 20 hours ago

      It's because you can ssh into something and VNC sucks. GUIs are great when you're sitting in front of the computer it's running on. Trying to do anything remotely with them is terrible. RDP is pretty great at making that experience suck less tho.

      • Oreb · 17 hours ago

        Ironically, remote work is the main thing I use Claude Desktop (and mobile) for. When I work locally, I’m usually happy with the TUI, unless I need a lot of equations or images. When I work remotely, keeping the SSH connection alive or juggling tmux sessions is too much of a hassle, and running the remote session from Claude Desktop/mobile is more comfortable.

        • smashed · 17 hours ago

          Claude has a killer feature for me with that remote-control command. Spawn a Claude TUI where you need it and take remote control with no friction. I tried it in codex and they messed up the flow so bad. You need to add a device oauth token every time you set it up even though it's already logged into your account.

        • adamisnotroman · 16 hours ago

          Just a heads up, I build Cosyra, a mobile terminal app, so this problem is something I've been considering a lot. For the SSH side, mosh fixes most of it. And for the tmux sessions I use a leader terminal who does all the juggling for me. Remote control is great, but then I'm completely locked into using Claude which, for me, does not work.

        • fragmede · 2 hours ago

          Have you heard about sixel or the kitty graphics protocol? I. what makes me a terminal terrorist, I've got an adaptation of cat on my GitHub where you can cat an image in the terminal, and if you're using a modern terminal, it'll display the graphic.

    • dns_snek · 20 hours ago

      One benefit is that they're easy to use remotely over SSH or in a VM, but I agree that a local, native GUI is generally better than a TUI.

      • fauigerzigerk · 19 hours ago

        You can use VSCode over SSH as well.

        • dns_snek · 18 hours ago

          You can but with agents you might want a security boundary/faux-airgap between the agent and your machine. I don't think you should trust X11/Wayland forwarding to maintain strong isolation against a malicious server in that scenario. TUIs are superior in that case because they cuts the attack surface down to a regular SSH session.

          • smashed · 17 hours ago

            Agreed. I sandbox agents using containers which also allows me to inject credentials and all sorts of things. I think there's 2 clear layers in these coding tools: the runtime engine that lives ON the system, can execute commands, read/write files, make network calls and the UI, which can be a local (TUI) or remote. A remote UI allows you to manage multiple remote runtimes concurrently and can even be on your phone. Anyone preferring Desktop vs TUI is not managing multiple systems I would guess.

    • queenkjuul · 20 hours ago

      Personally the Claude Code TUI also sucked every time i used it. Scrollback bugs in IDEA embedded shells, extraneous output vs the VSCode extension, and unreliable links to source code. Isn't the CC TUI written in React?? I mean my web dev "all i have is this hammer" brain is intrigued, but surely, there's better things to do? Like you said, the terminal is great for piping inputs and outputs, for scripting, for bulk operations. It's really not great for real time interaction across many files, which is how i use CC and kind of wonder how you would use it any other way. (I guess if you literally just prompt and pray, the UI literally doesn't matter?)

    • bluegatty · 20 hours ago

      Terminals are 'activity dense' and usually have a lot of key cusotmizations. You can't even have 'tabs' inside of Claude Desktop, which is a dealbreaker for most power users.

    • barnabee · 19 hours ago

      Most GUIs are designed in a way that I dislike. It’s true that terminals lack power compared to GUIs, and some GUI apps (Bloomberg, Blender, …) are reasonably well designed for their use case, but most GUIs are such a disaster that it’s almost more fun interacting with them via curl to an API or SQL directly to a database. The other problem is that all the GUI apps look different. I really want one extremely powerful, composable GUI “framework” that all apps sit within. Ideally I could even decompose and recombine parts of different apps into new tools or workspaces. Now that anyone can build a GUI by prompting LLMs, maybe we’ll get actually good GUIs, or at least be able to build our own, but up to now the direction of travel has been disappointing to say the least.

      • orbital-decay · 18 hours ago

        Most agentic UIs are structured exactly the same regardless of the interface. TUIs are not composable in any possible meaning of that word (unlike CLI/REPL), they are GUIs on a fixed cell grid. Real TUI aren't unified either.

        • smashed · 17 hours ago

          They are rich TUI but they remain somewhat scriptable environments. From the plain claude -p to run Claude code unattended, all the way to setting up hooks, MCP tools and injecting key presses. Complex and hackish yes, but probably not worse than attempting to automate fully GUI tools like Claude desktop which is meant to automate stuff, not the other way around.

          • orbital-decay · 16 hours ago

            All that is completely UI-agnostic and not related to GUI/TUI distinction in absolutely any way. Keypress automation is terrible, if you have to resort to jank like this you'd better use something like AT-SPI (which no TUI implements) or at least DOM manipulation and userscripts on web, although I've never seen a use case for that, sanely designed agents are malleable enough to avoid it. The point is that I agree with the OP, terminals are fundamentally unfit for applications like agents that are not REPL and need complex interfaces. All attempts to fit them into it I've seen are 99% cargo cult, like the entire TUI zoo that keeps layering the cruft just because people are culturally averse to clean first-principle designs or put pretentious "aesthetics" first. Just look at the amount of misconceptions voiced ITT. This incidental complexity is destined to snowball into web/Electron-like Rube Goldberg machines pretty fast, and I guarantee you will hate it. It's already spinning out of control with agents.

      • jcarver · 15 hours ago

        I suspect that this is what Mitchell Hashimoto is up to with Rex and Superlinear.

    • elxr · 18 hours ago

      Because a minimum viable GUI is way worse experience than a minimum viable TUI. Also GUIs take more skill in order to feel performant, which many companies do not possess (just look at various documentation webapps that take >100ms just to navigate between really simple mostly-text pages. Horrible). Good GUIs with full keyboard functionality are definitely better than TUIs though. There's just no guarantee that some solo dev'd GUI for a brand new workflow can meet that standard.

• sadilek · 21 hours ago

  I went the same way but found that the GUIs (Claude and Codex Desktop) are still too low-level to scale well. They are basically just tabbed chat windows. I wanted more structure and more targeted UX for managing my work. It's easy nowadays to build your own GUI, so I did. (I found it's still quite some work to polish it so that it's actually good. Therefore, sharing it could still benefit others, so I did: obeya.si, free, open-source)

  • rglynn · 12 hours ago

    Yeah I feel like a lot of us have reached this conclusion, I myself have also built a custom one for my use-cases as its fun to tinker. There are tons available now in different flavours: t3code, herdr, cmux, paseo, happycoder – to name a few off the top of my head.

• Lapel2742 · 21 hours ago

  > Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces? I generally prefer GUIs but I'm OK with a TUI harness. Anyway, there's a web frontend for Pi ( https://github.com/agegr/pi-web ) which looks very promising although it still has some rough edges. They even have an interactive demo: https://agegr.github.io/pi-web/ I'm not associated with the project.

• jnordt · 20 hours ago

  I went from TUI and tested several GUIs that can also support a "TUI" view. After testing several options at the moment I'm using Orca IDE as my daily driver - effectively as a layer on top anthropic / openai - Supports both anthropic and openai with subscriptions and can you swithc easily between those two + other LLms - Its a bit hidden / non intuitive to setup but it does support running everything on remove host -> I run (95%) of my jobs on remote hosts that I can both access from my laptop + their native app via a wirguard vpn - You can switch between chatview + TUI on the same conversation - very useful if you move e.g. from desktop session to mobile view. - For repeating LLM tasks Orca also suports a kind of scheduler - but I prefer currently to have the agent set things up via chronjobs on the remote machine (not super happy with this ...) Key reason I dont want to go fully ChatGPT/Claude is also I dont want to build a super strong dependency on those mega players and remain the ability to switch to other interefernce providers / models. As LLM usage is already a core workflow in our company - a sudden unavailability of one or a massive price increase - makes it absolutely necessary to build out alternatives. We all know the downsides of SAAS Lock in too well from the 2010s. In that sense Fool me once, fool me twice..

  • meetingthrower · 17 hours ago

    +1 on the Orca and remote machine. I've basically turned it into my own Claw machine. It does super well at letting me remote in across 3 computers and phone and hitting all the same sessions. I have one master session that is always kept alive as my main "agent", and spin out other full sessions from that. It solves the crappy user experience of the CLI vs using an SSH terminal in VS code. (Easy copy pasting, everything formatted correctly, etc.) I created my own version of artifact hosting with a simple "mailbox" page on the box - every session can drop it's html reports off there nicely. Completely agree on being able to flex out to different models. I'm using Claude Code as daily driver given the insane subsidies we are getting. But want something where I can switch easily onto the open weights, etc.

    • sidrag22 · 13 hours ago

      I kinda built a "mailbox" style feature for models to dump images in, its really annoying to chase down the goofy spots they decide to dump images for review otherwise, my web ui just gets a little popup when the images are ready to review, i review them and send them back and it injects my response into the session.

  • baxuz · 17 hours ago

    Sadly Orca doesn't support chatview via WSL

  • joshspankit · 9 hours ago

    > Key reason I dont want to go fully ChatGPT/Claude is also I dont want to build a super strong dependency on those mega players and remain the ability to switch to other interefernce providers / models. Pragmatically I agree with you, but I also believe that the landscape ahead is going to look so different that locking in to current tools won’t do anything to lock you in to near-future tools

  • frogperson · 7 hours ago

    Orca looks neat, but also super dangerous. It runs everything in yolo mode and actively fights staying in any sandbox you try to put it in. TUI's might not have the best UI ever, but its much easier locking them down via something like nono.sh. I can sleep at night and not have to worry where my keys and .env files are being sent.

  • kapitalx · 3 hours ago

    Yeah I tried going to GUIs aswell but ended up writing my own Terminal manager called switchboard. Since then I've tried a few others, like T3, which is pretty decent, but still keep coming back to Switchboard. It supports both Claude and Codex CLIs together with project grouping organization. https://github.com/doctly/switchboard

• user43928 · 20 hours ago

  I switched to the GUIs half a year ago and never looked back. From the text rendering and scrolling alone, they are much more pleasant to work with. Conversations with activity and MR status indicators, nested sessions, images in the chat, and generally more information and functionality on the screen. One negative is that it gives Claude, and particularly Codex, room to mess up with auto-opening artifacts. Codex, when I was still using it, kept opening report or comparison pages in fullscreen when I did not ask for artifacts. Claude loves to open its iOS simulator pane, but somehow never displays the one it's actually using, instead showing a simulator that is idle. It might be related to my custom tooling.

• noduerme · 20 hours ago

  No idea what you're working on, but if it's anything involving sifting a lot of data, how do you know if your code actually works or does what Claude says it's doing?

• VMG · 20 hours ago

  Some of it is the historical snobbery that CLI users have for GUI users. I count myself among them. Isn't it way cooler how I can fix my NIC with just three chained bash commands, while the windows users have to navigate 8 levels of dialogues? But that mentality doesn't leave room for a lot of nuance. Even the most hard core TUI proponents and neovim gurus probably do not use Lynx as their browser (well maybe they use a vibe coded hacker news TUI client instead)

• olalonde · 20 hours ago

  I was confused until you mentioned you were running it in VS Code. That issue goes away if you run it in a standalone terminal with tmux or tabs.

• cromka · 19 hours ago

  I hear people swear by https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo Not only it's a GUI in client-server topology, it can also orchestrate the agents to work for you. Haven't tried it yet.

  • codethief · 19 hours ago

    Looks like GitHub is down (again)? I'm getting a 504.

    • cromka · 19 hours ago

      Works for me

    • wccrawford · 15 hours ago

      It's been up and down for me all morning.

  • chrisweekly · 15 hours ago

    Thanks, bookmarked. Orca is another option in this space https://onorca.dev

  • CharlieDigital · 14 hours ago

    Paseo has been pretty amazing at getting more autonomy. It's the way the agent profiles work. It is effectively a fully adaptive "auto-harness" with just the tiniest amount of config. Fully switched from TUI 4 weeks back while testing it out for another use case. Wrote about my setup here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/10/larping-with-agents-and-wh...

• thomasahle · 19 hours ago

  I mostly use TUI because I have agents running on different servers over SSH. I often need agents on one server to talk to a different agent on another server through tmux, and it's just much easier with TUI.

• badestrand · 19 hours ago

  I also like the inner text display of the GUI more, but the window management of it terrible IMO. On my Mac I have 3 desktops open, one for "private" and two for a project each. With the Claude TUIs I just have 1-5 open terminals per desktop, each with its title neatly set automatically. With the GUI app, I can only have 1 open, not one per desktop. It seems you can open several very reduced versions of the Claudr app with a single chat but that didn't work well for me. So that's why I'm still with TUIs..

  • jaapz · 19 hours ago

    Try herdr (or something like it). For me it fits exactly between claude desktop and having lots of open terminals. The UI can be made to fit exactly the workflow you want to have. I switched to it recently - my previous workflow was managing many terminals in a tiling window manager but I just kept losing track of stuff.

• sdevonoes · 19 hours ago

  Im also using the desktop apps (codex/claude). Using the tui doesn’t bring any advantage anymore. I can drag and drop pdfs, images, i have the browser view, can easily switch between conversations, fork them at any point. I use whatever IDE to review the code, read tests, etc. I used to use the terminal for everything prio AI, but not anymore.

  • slowin · 16 hours ago

    You can drag and drop files in the TUI. You can also paste in images. With tmux you have forking, and tmux windows are fully scriptable, and controllable via your agent. I have them run shell tasks in tmux windows so I can see what they’re doing.

• richardw · 19 hours ago

  Just GUI now. I can also connect to Mac Codex from my phone and have a voice chat with it. Collects all my work in projects, can jump in and out anytime. Can start a project on the phone, move to Mac. (Almost) No sync issues, which I found the TUI/phone had.

• Daviey · 19 hours ago

  I find TUI scales better for multiple concurrent agents across the same and different codebases, especially using tools such as herdr. I can fire off an agent, which runs sub-agents. Then check-in periodically to re-steer as needed or be interrupt driven for completions of tasks. I can't see how vscode/GUI is better for this?

  • nvarsj · 19 hours ago

    Same... I use herdr to manage 12+ sessions easily. There's no GUI that can do that.

    • mike_hearn · 17 hours ago

      Herdr looks similar to the Jetbrains Air stuff they just added to their IDEs. You can have GUI sessions in tabs, label them, tag them, stick them in folders, archive them, put them next to the code that's being changed, etc.

      • Mike_weinberg · 15 hours ago

        Cc desktop supports folders, named tabs, archived sessions, subagents with two way comms between them and their spawner. You cannot put them next to code being changed but the code viewers are contextual to the session. I am struggling to see a major difference let alone major advantage of herdr

        • NeutralCrane · 12 hours ago

          Does CC desktop support non-Claude models? That could be a big one. Herdr works pretty seemlessly with any model provider and different harnesses, like Pi.

    • free652 · 15 hours ago

      I am using paseo.sh, with 12+ sessions across pi/codex/agy on 3 dev machines.

    • arw0n · 15 hours ago

      This seems to be the new meta for a segment of the HN crowd, and I'm struggling to understand how it works. I'm at most having 4 sessions parallely, and even then I am burned out after a full day of this. How can you keep up with what all the agents are doing?

      • gedy · 15 hours ago

        From the people around me doing this - they aren't keeping up, they aren't looking at the finished project/product, then throwing it over the wall for others to triage. Rinse and repeat. Definitely fits some people's personalities, but not mine.

        • timacles · 14 hours ago

          no way anyone has 12 "projects" that are even worth working on. No one at any company is working on 12 things at the same time. I guarantee they're just starting a bunch of half baked random projects, abandoning them half way through and starting 12 new ones.

          • cityhall · 13 hours ago

            They're probably calling things projects that most of us would call tasks or minor features.

          • uaksom · 13 hours ago

            It's less 12 projects and more 1 project + 11 changes/experiments. Complex projects still get the most attention, but I do a lot more work which may end up being discarded, and agents pick up any tasks which would've otherwise landed in the backlog. Update dependencies here, rebase this branch, start working on this issue, change this and benchmark it, etc.

          • procone · 12 hours ago

            I mean... I do. And yes they're all worth working on.

            • gedy · 12 hours ago

              I think the point was why working on simultaneously, aside from inability to prioritize.

      • nvarsj · 14 hours ago

        I guess the main benefit of herdr is it essentially flags the state of agents and what needs attention. So you can have multiple ones running and quickly go to the ones that need an input. I think there _is_ a way to do this nicely in a GUI btw, which I've been toying with as a side project. Basically... build it as a trello style board. And it's not 12 projects, its multiple tasks, e.g. 'look at this crash for me', 'fix this extension in my pi env that is doing something bad', 'debug this high memory usage', etc. etc. It's easy to just fire tasks off and come back to them later. The project ones usually require more human focus ofc. Now if only I could automate meetings like this.

        • neuronexmachina · 13 hours ago

          > I think there _is_ a way to do this nicely in a GUI btw, which I've been toying with as a side project. Basically... build it as a trello style board Something like Orca's Agent Dashboard, or something else? https://www.onorca.dev/docs/model/agents-sessions

          • alexjameson · 13 hours ago

            It took me like 500k tokens to vibe a similar kanban board for OpenCode desktop (I took orca and herdr as references). It is a v2 plugin and I love it. It does what I need across all my projects, I tweak it the way I need, and it's much more convenient than the native tab panel.

            • indigodaddy · 10 hours ago

              Link?

      • oxidant · 12 hours ago

        I've found an agent to manage agents, plus aggressively creating skills/workflows helps. The main agent is the entry point: "review this PR" should open a new workspace and spin up one or more agents to do whatever review workflow you like. "Implement ticket xyz" should open a new space, read the ticket content, plan/write/test/review/create a PR without much managerial input. You'll still need to answer questions and check work between steps, but all of the busy work can be done by your agent(s) with skills. If they get it wrong, update the skill. Same for "research this bug report/product question/error trace".

    • appplication · 13 hours ago

      I’m not sure I understand. I use codex as is with 12+ sessions, there’s no issue at all and my coworkers scale it far beyond that.

    • oh_no · 12 hours ago

      what? herdr and gui interface for this look very similar aside from being able to have 12 windows open at the same time in herdr but i don't want that?

  • ianm218 · 18 hours ago

    For me the tight integration with Claude Artifacts (and whatever OpenAIs copy of those is) is super value-able for me. The biggest bottleneck for me is gathering all my thoughts and analyzing what needs to be done. I was a long term user of the TUI and tools like cmux / herdr but now I find it much easier to actually focus

    • leourbina · 16 hours ago

      Check out https://open-artifacts.com - it gives you that and much more. It also allows your agent sessions to talk to each other regardless of which machine they’re running on. It’s free and OSS. I’m the creator - happy to answer questions.

      • meetingthrower · 16 hours ago

        Very nice!!! I actually built something much more primitive as my workflow too. I'll definitely send the robots to learn from you and what you did! (Edited after research: I picked up your ideas of search and versioning. Very nice! Thank you!)

      • ianm218 · 12 hours ago

        I’ll send this to the team at my company. No one likes feeling vendor locked in on artifacts but they are great at being like “hey I had an agent cook on this topic over night, here are the results, and what we need to make a decision on”. Just some feedback for corporate use - it’s not clear to me from the landing page if it’s really intended for internal company use and if it’s hard tied to CloudFlare. I.e. if there was a “here’s how you can deploy it on AWS in 2 minutes” option I would just toss it on our dev env and show people a POC. With open source projects we’re increasingly worried about supply chain type risks - it would be good if there was some boilerplate on “this is how you know this can be deployed internally and have zero risk of phoning home etc”

        • leourbina · 12 hours ago

          Hey, great feedback. I'm currently re-doing the landing page as the project has expanded quite a bit (including native annotations/comments, presence, inter-instance collaboration/sharing, Yjs based real-time collaboration for agents and humans, etc). Currently this works using Cloudflare Workers (and Durable Objects). This provides your agents with trivial tools to make realtime multi-player artifacts. Some demos include (all made by DeepSeek v4.1 Flash in ~5-10m each: - Real-time tic-ta-toe: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/kA5P1UTCZ9jwRSAx - Chess: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/ErF1KapC2paDnmgs - Mini version of r/place (pixel canvas): https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/xsDmeifD7bX7NeSJ - Live poll: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/a/PY6AbssBQg4epqgk The full list of demos is here: https://demo.open-artifacts.com/ I'll be opening sign-ups for a hosted version in the coming days. All feedback welcome. Actively trying to make it better.

      • upcoming-sesame · 12 hours ago

        interesting seems like they "gadgets" concept of Cloudflare OS [1] but decoupled front Cloudflare OS chat interface. It even runs on Durable Object like CFOS 1. https://os.cloudflare.app/

        • leourbina · 10 hours ago

          Exactly. It is based on Cloudflare primitives to give real-time/multiplayer capabilities to artifacts. It also comes with a bus (originally made it as a separate project https://open-bus.ai , but made it all into one project). The problem I'm trying to solve for myself is: I want to have a single place where me and my collaborators (my agents, other humans and _their_ agents) can all come together and do work efficiently. It's like a Google Docs/Drive but for the AI era and not tied to any one AI lab.

  • oh_no · 12 hours ago

    have you used the GUIs recently? because this is literally what they are best for.

• KronisLV · 19 hours ago

  > now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop Same, it's lovely software for that mode of work! I also briefly tried out other ADEs, like: - Kepler (by the GitKraken folks) - https://www.gitkraken.com/kepler - Paseo - https://paseo.sh/ Kepler had a really nice issue tracker integration but the UI was very vibey and not quite as to the point as I'd like (who needs graph visualization of what the agents do, just give me tools that work), and Paseo had a really nice UI that I could use to drive both Codex and Claude Code, but some OpenCode agents would sometimes hang and I didn't have tools to really do anything about it. Maybe I should also give JetBrains Air a look again, if I ever end up subscribing to them again (I just moved to Zed for my code editing): https://www.jetbrains.com/air/ Interesting space, with so many additional tools popping up! That said, the OpenCode TUI was really pleasant too.

  • wccrawford · 18 hours ago

    I actually just decided to cancel my Jetbrains account, and your comment made me think about trying Air before I go. I went to my Jetbrains Toolbox, and it's not there. I went to the site, and there are 3 options: Install it as a plugin to one of their other IDEs. This feels really stupid to me. Air Teams. This isn't widely available yet, and you have to ask nicely and be put on a list. No go. Air CLI. I honestly don't know WTF this is doing that I couldn't just do from the CLI with my existing agents. I already have Antigravity (for planning) using Claude for implementation and all I had to do was ask Antigravity to set it up. They really need to get their stuff together over there at Jetbrains.

    • KronisLV · 18 hours ago

      Don't forget about their AI Assistant (agentic but mostly chat focused plugin) and Junie (a harness, that you can apparently use through Air too), people have critiqued them about it being messy, but tbh OpenCode for example has TUI, web and desktop versions heh. Oh to make things more interesting, Air also has a mobile option too, adding to the list. Odd to couple it with an IDE though since you have various IDEs for various stacks (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA vs WebStorm vs GoLand, unless you just shove a crapload of plugins into IDEA) and agentic tools don't always need all of that. To be fair though, they're probably scrambling to keep up with the AI craze because it cuts into their margins A LOT and throwing everything they can at the wall. Shame they killed Fleet, could have been a cool basis to compete with Zed (or VS Code, more directly) and integrate Air there or something.

      • owlstuffing · 14 hours ago

        >Shame they killed Fleet, could have been a cool basis to compete with Zed (or VS Code, more directly) and integrate Air there or something. JB’s wheelhouse is human-oriented code authoring, they own it. That realization is the fundamental reason they abandoned Fleet: as with VS Code and others, Fleet was draining their talent and would have resulted in a tool that wasn’t best-of-breed in any one category. This situation reminds me of the beginning of the end of Borland’s demise: they spent nearly two years writing OS/2 versions of all their language products, suspending innovation and progress across the board, and allowing the competition (Microsoft) to catch up and begin to hire away their talent. This story doesn’t perfectly align with JB, but it definitely rhymes. I hope they switched gears soon enough.

        • KronisLV · 12 hours ago

          > Fleet was draining their talent and would have resulted in a tool that wasn’t best-of-breed in any one category. Visual Studio Code, but JetBrains would have been pretty cool, especially when you want something that supports other modes of work (e.g. ADE). Now VSC/Zed fills that role and JetBrains don’t compete with them, now even to upsell to their full IDE for more deep work.

    • mike_hearn · 17 hours ago

      Air was a standalone app, but it wasn't clear why and they got feedback that this wasn't wanted. You can have the exact same GUIs and functionality integrated into the IDE and it's a pure functionality upgrade. For example, Air in IntelliJ/their other IDEs lets you do things like execute SQL queries on connected databases from the chat box and have the results be sent straight to the model. There's a school of thought that says IDEs are history, their functionality is now worthless etc. But apparently lots of people don't think that. I guess I'm one of those people too, because I tried the Air standalone app but it didn't gel for me for some reason. But I tried Air in IntelliJ and it immediately clicked. If models were always perfect and their work never benefited from reviews or changes, fine, you could argue the IDE is pointless. But it's been years and I've not yet found a model where that's true. You can slop for a while if the project isn't that important but for the stuff that matters, human intervention still changes the quality slope quite a lot.