Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code | Hacker News Reader

Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code

claudiacode.com

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’m assuming/hoping this is gonna end up as regular plugins for existing IDEs

That's kind of what I mean though.

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.

Didn’t know about roo! But I’m with you; I don’t see why folks are investing their efforts in building more of these shiny wrappers, and what their expected end game could be.

Not tied to VSCode is a big one for me. This one is agnostic.

Continue.dev has some features, but it’s on VSCode and Jetbrains

"agnostically gnostic".

you give up one side of freedom (the ide) for the other (the backend).

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.

There are lots and lots and lots of us that don't like using VSCode, want to use our own IDE of choice and use Claude Code. Terminal / standalone app is best for me there or even better an IDE plugin.

A tiny island is fine for a tool like this - not everything needs an 'ecosystem'.

The thing about tiny islands isn't that every tool needs a sprawling ecosystem to thrive. It's that applications that don't develop a userbase tend to die. This is as true of open source apps as it is commercial ones.

Typically, applications develop a userbase when they offer something that people can't find elsewhere.

What I'm saying isn't "everyone should be using VScode extensions for this"; it's "I see nothing to distinguish this from a bunch of other functionally identical applications and people just keep building them." I literally don't see a single unique feature promoted on the landing page.

My fundamental point is that we're in a gold rush phase where people are all building the same thing. We'll eventually see a handful of apps get popular and effort swell around those instead of everyone reimplementing the same thing. And my money is on that looking a lot like it usually does: the winners will be the apps that find some way to differentiate themselves.

> the trend seems to be everyone developing a million disparate tools

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.)

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.

If you don't care about bleeding edge, most of these will fall to the wayside and a few superior options will win out.

Otherwise, you're going to see the variations on the same thing over and over, which is totally fine, and where innovation comes from.

Personally, I just use stock VS Code (copilot) and Cursor.

> 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.

> lots of people doing alternative interfaces to access Facebook and Reddit.

So… what we had on web 2 then, with its daily twitter clients? There were hundreds and hundreds of them

Twitter wasn’t nearly as big or influential, that comparison doesn’t hold. Furthermore, I was replying directly to the reference of “lots of aggregators and forums instead of "Reddit and others."”, which obviously excludes Twitter as part of the “others”.

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.

> primary variation being greater-or-lesser lock-in to a particular set of services

> 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

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.

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.

> 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.

Wait, aren’t you describing Dropbox?

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.

The money is in the hardware, not the software.

I still can't figure out how to set up a completely free, completely private/no-accounts method of connecting an IDE to LM Studio. I thought it would be "Continue" extension for VS Code, but even for local LM integration it insists I sign-in to their service before continuing.

Roo code in vs code, and qwen coder in lm studio is a decent local only combo.

Strongly seconding Roo Code. I am using it in VSCodium and it's the perfect partner for a fully local coding workflow (nearly 100% open-source too so no vendor is going to pry it from my hand, "ever").

Qwen Coder 30B is my main driver in this configuration and in my experience is quite capable. It runs at 80 tok/s on my M3 Max and I'm able to use it for about 30-50% of my coding tasks, the most menial ones. I am exploring ways to RL its approach to coding so it fits my style a bit more and it's a very exciting prospect whenever I manage to figure it out.

The missing link is autocomplete since Roo only solves the agent part. Continue.dev does a decent job at that but you really want to pair it with a high performance, large context model (so it fits multiple code sections + your recent changes + context about the repo and gives fast suggestions) and that doesn't seem feasible or enjoyable yet in a fully local setup.

Thanks to both for recommending roo, it is the closest I've gotten. I still can't get it to work the way I expect.

When I use qwen coder 30B directly to create a small demo web page, it gives me apl the files and filenames. When I do the same thing in roo chat (set to coder) and it runs around in circles, doesn't build multiple files and eventually crashes out.

Huh? I have Continue on Codium talking to ollama, all local, and I never signed up to nuffin’

Both Roo and Continue support local modals (via LM Studio). For Continue, you add a fake account (type in literally anything) and then click 'edit' -- it will take you to the settings JSON, and you can type in LM Studio as your source.

The main problem I'm seeing, is that a lot of the tooling doesn't work as well "agentically" with the models. (Most of these tools say something like 'works best with Claude, tested with Claude, good luck with any local models'). The local models via LM Studio already works really well for pure chat, but occasionally trip up semi-regularly on basic things, like writing files or running commands -- stuff that say, GitHub Copilot has mostly already polished.

But those are basically just bugs in tooling that will likely get fixed. The local-only setup is behind the current commercial market -- but not much behind.

I strongly agree with the commenter above, if the commercial models and tooling slow down at any point, the free/open models and tooling will absolutely catch up -- I'd guess within 9 months or so.

>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.

Claude’s wide adoption makes it more likely Anthropic will stay SotA, as do the max plans. This is the training data they crave to be able to improve, and it’s costing them peanuts while identifying customers who’ll pay and building loyalty. The data flywheel enabled by Claude is the closest thing to a vault any of the models have right now.

Anthropic's models are fantastic, but they are -- by far -- one of the most expensive providers on an API basis. That's a large part of what makes the Max plans a great deal, right now.

Even on a Max plan, it's not hard to completely blow through your usage limits if you try to use Opus heavily.

All it takes is another provider to land a combination of model and cost that makes Code less of a deal for vendor lock-in to become a problem.

Do they have such a flywheel? I remember I had to specifically opt-in to sharing my Claude Code sessions with them. I think by default they aren't training on people's sessions.

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.

May I know what the other 2 tools are?

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.

https://happy.engineering/docs/comparisons/alternatives/#qui...

There are more more desktop apps, probably because those are easier to design.

Has anyone put together a comparison table for Desktop apps?

I’ve started using conductor.build and it feels nice, but would happily evaluate others.

OpenAI Codex is available on the mobile app.

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.

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.

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.

There’s value in Anthropic being able to optimize their model’s front end to fulfill whatever features they plan for CC - like tool calling. You point out a valid risk of lock-in, maybe this signals they are committed to being at the forefront of coding models (part of enterprise play)?

While I prefer Cline/Roo at work where I have multiple API plans for AI models, for personal I have Claude Pro and that really only works with Claude code. The benefit is that I can use it on a $20 a month plan.

Roo can use Claude Code as a provider.

I mostly use Claude Code with a Max plan via Roo. I have the option of sending prompts to OpenRouter if I've hit usage limits or if I want to try a particular task with a different model (e.g., I'll sometimes flip to Gemini Pro if a particular task could benefit its large context windows).

The situation with models right now is that to eke out that last bit of performance, you have to do some things in ways that are specific to the model in question - wording of prompts, when and where to introduce relevant parts into context etc.

Because Claude code does offer particular features. More important than “features” is the fact that it works and does the things you want like 60-70% of the time, with guardrails and practice and attention. Which is way better than competing tools.

Besides that. These tools are changing so fast that to build an agent agnostic tool would be insane given the speed and market pressures right now. Why support roo or cline or cursor cli if it adds 3x engineering cost for 20% more market reach? The reality is there are no standards around the way the actual leading tools work if you wanna build something on Claude/codex/(insert flavor of the week).

Gotta pick your horse and try to hang on, and hope you picked right.

> Claude may be arguably the best model, but why decide unilaterally for your users that they _have_ to use it?

What a ridiculous proposition. It’s me making the app right? You getting to use it (if you want) is purely incidental. If you never use it because it doesn’t support anything but claude, that’s not something I consider a problem.

This is true for now.

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.

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.

ChatGPT feels more like CoffeeScript to me - theoretically a good idea at the time but bound to be replaced.

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.

Claude doesn't seem very good at translation to me compared to GPT*. It also can't understand video like Gemini.

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'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...

[1] https://github.com/slopus/happy

Woah, cool! Having a phone connection to Claude code is something I’ve been looking for

I currently do this with Termius and ssh into the box I’m working on the launching Claude Code. Only issue I have is the occasional network issue causing the session to drop.

You likely know this, but in case you don’t: Termius makes it easy to use “mosh”, which makes your connection resistant to network drops and resumable. I am experimenting with it right now. Once you install mosh on your serve, click the “mosh” setting in the connection settings in Termius, and you are good to go.

Ive been using mosh + tmux to really keep it persistent between clients.

The only thing I need this point is a push notification when it needs an approval or it has stopped.

This looks awesome, but I was surprised to see the relay server being necessary. Can I self-host that too?

Yes you can self host the relay server (and please do so!). If you are like me and already have Mac Mini in a closet running docker, k3s, or just have a friend group kubernetes cluster, you can get it running in about 3 minutes.

https://happy.engineering/docs/guides/self-hosting/

https://github.com/slopus/happy-server

There is a Dockerfile, plus a docker-compose.yaml, and a complete Kubernetes template as well.

Why a relay server? I want an app to just work with no fuss while running an AI agent on arbitrary consumer hardware. Having both the mobile app and agent wrapper process connect outwards through any firewalls and networks to a third computer on the public internet is the most boring and dumb way for it always to work.

Plus I wanted a system that did not require the app and the computer running the AI agent to both be online at the same time. Having a third computer act as a dumb mailbox handles some corner cases I care about.

I've been trying to surreptitiously get claude code and an oven specific MCP server to run on my friend's smart oven for a prank. However this oven enters a low power state when you don't interact with it; killing the network connection. My vision is to queue up commands via the mobile app with fuzzy logic, and then have the oven make weird noises as determined by claude code at some later point when they go to make a pizza or something.

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!

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.

Is a whole IDE really the solution though?

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.

> with the primary variation being greater-or-lesser lock-in

All the more reason to embrace a fully open source stack. We need to go hard on "lesser".

These are the typical effects of being "in a bubble" stage of evolution.

Lots of competing actors doing lots of similar things with confusing comparisons and quantifiable results.

deleted roo code vs code extension as soon as i tried claude code, ppl really need to stop trying to extend the editor lol

I mean technically you can use Claude Code Router and then use any LLM with Claudia

Have you tried claude code router? Looking at all the options, trying to see what would be a good configuration example.

Yeah, I am quite exhausted at this point by this. I just look at it, blink, and move on.

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.

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.

* 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.

Use Claudia to onboard the first users, gain some traction, and when the inevitable C&D letter comes change the name.

McDonalds v McDowells all over again: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/afXxlaUShPA

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.

Agreed

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.

Claudia is open-source, made by a S24 YC company https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/asterisk

How will they make money?

Step 1: Manufacture a bunch of low-quality "good enough" codebases

Step 2: Turn around and sell security-as-a-service to the most profitable products

Hosted version… like every oss project…

It’s a desktop app.

many desktop apps have hosted versions

I can’t think of any free desktop app that would have a non-free hosted version.

AGPL suggests you are correct

The only way there is to make money - from VCs.

It seems to be a side-gig to bring attention to their company. Well done.

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.

I also made the assumption. Once I found out it wasn't it was a huge red flag. I don't like it at all.

Agreed - I was about to send this round to my colleagues.

For once reading the comments first has paid off!

Same here, first thing I did was to scroll down to see company in the footer and nope... somebody will be receiving legal letters soon I'd guess.

This is exactly why trademarks exist, and why if they want to bother, Anthropic can 100% make them change the name.

Same reason you can't release a handheld console called the Gamegirl, or a voice assistant called Alexis.

Oh wow. I thought it was anthropic even after skimming the site. The color scheme and styling is pretty similar. That feels a little slimy.

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.

Once Anthropic starts receiving a wave of support tickets they would be forced to change their name, CLAUDia is just a misspelled ClaudAi

I'm shocked that YC hasn't advised them that this name is terrible. It actively breaks trust by trying to piggyback on Anthropic's tool naming.

Move fast and break things. Being edgy like this is what VC's want to see.

Grab Claudet and Claudette quick!

More than that, the peer comments would support trademark issues

Lots of apps named after the Whisper model (including mine - https://whispermemos.com/)

I wonder if I'll have to rename at some point.

If you're adding another word, it sounds more differentiated than Claude to Claudia. I was among the many who thought this was an official product from the makers of Claude. It's like if your product was called Whisperer.

Wow, I thought it was an official app. Now I wonder what telemetry or even conversation data I have just sent offsite.

As others have said, this is a giant red flag.

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.

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.

Could you show an example of a native desktop app (or a similarly complex app) being worked on with this approach?

> 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.

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.

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 :)

sarcasm? macOS and iOS has all this today.

Apple Containers!! Very new! https://youtube.com/watch?v=CYd9MC3L11o

If you use VS:Code, Anthropic provides an example DevContainer.

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!)

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.

Every dev container needs to login again, can’t use browser mcp, high cpu.. still a few issues

Perhaps this helps: https://container-use.com/introduction

Why not just run the assistant as a user with limited permissions? Your OS likely supplies all the handcuffs you're going to need.

I’ve recently built something which runs helps you run cc in cloud sandboxes maybe that would be helpful: https://www.devfleet.ai

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.

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.

Very much feels like we're in the "Twitter client" phase of LLM IDEs...

what happend after the Twitter client phase???

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.

The fate of Twitterrific and Apollo for Reddit come to mind.

Wow, I really miss Apollo. I haven’t used Reddit since it got priced out.

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.

This is a good take. And the fate of these tools seems like it's going to be similar.

Can you imagine Twitter/Reddit clients if the APIs were still free in the age of LLMs

In a way this is probably the future state - 1000 different clients for 1000 different people, each fully customized to their taste

> /Reddit

Still miss Apollo

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.

1. https://github.com/siteboon/claudecodeui

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.

Pretty neat, links included below for convenience:

https://vibetunnel.sh/

https://github.com/amantus-ai/vibetunnel

Many of my claude tasks get frequently get stuck over small stuff, or require input from me, so I had Claude whip up something comparable in a few minutes. Now I can keep them moving remotely with ease and not be stuck in front of a desktop monitoring them! It's dreamy.

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...)

Similar request as the parent, my use case is I setup a long prompt/task and like to go for a walk around the block to get my legs moving. Being able to "move the llm along" and make small modifications from my phone would be nice. Personally, I'd never do a long session that way but the chance to move my legs while it does a long task but not get stuck on a simple question in the claude tool would be lovely.

use Termius (shell client for iOS devices). put your phone and laptop/desktop on the same VPN. SSH in, use Claude Code normally from anywhere

This showed up on Hacker News a few daysd ago:

https://omnara.com/

I use Termux and ssh for this. Plus Zellij/tmux. Classic stuff I used to do for regular dev back 10 years ago.

My phone also can build and run many projects on its own so I often don't even connect to the laptop.

If the app is as elegant as the website I have to pass. The menubar is hidden at the start - and also when you scroll back up. FAQ and Github Stars menu items are overlapping, so you could be clicking the wrong one. The icon looks like a light/dark theme switcher, but is not. Actually there is no light theme at all on the webpage, which depending on your environment can make it hard to read. I'm assuming the app is the same. Looks like I'm too old or not the target audience or both.

That video on the homepage is insane... please for the sake of your amazing app, slow it down and make it less frantic!

(Super rapid zooming in and out, flying all over screen at 3x speed, must cover eyes!!)

Agreed 100%. When you work on an app every day, it all makes sense to see the cool features flash by, but you need to design for people who don't have a clue what your app does.

All that manic zooming... reminded me of Wayne's World:

Extreme close-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxsWw_gV3E

Engineers often see no value in what marketers do. This video is what they don't do.

Wait, you are somehow sure that no marketer was involved in making this video? Seems unlikely

It stuns me how bad many engineers are in basic communication.

Made something? Dont start with a long, protracted "This is how i built it from step 1". Show the damn thing! Then tell me how you built which i will be interested in only if the product is good to begin with.

Video promises what it should: a dopamine shot!

Really good idea, I’ll have to try it out. The thing I really want is to have the ability to give a recipe for a new Claude code instance - spin up a docker image with code, data, and a running server and then let Claude work against that.

I’ve been wanting the same thing. I am currently experimenting with a container that adds what I want. I keep wanting my sandboxed dev machine that is preconfigured with Claude (and almost nothing else)…but then I also want my customized Claude. I saw someone here on HN the other day who just spins up a Docker container and shares their home directory Claude files with it to facilitate the customized Claude container:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549802

You can do this with devcontainer and still work within VSCode.

Agree would feel far more comfortable if each Claudia project was a separate docker container that was spun up with the appropriate tooling (Node, Python, etc.) particularly with flags like `--dangerously-skip-permissions`.

There is an outstanding feature request around it at least:

https://github.com/getAsterisk/claudia/issues/8

I've developed a system that checks out a git repo into a docker compose container, tells claude to read a feature story, then implement it with --dangerously-skip-permissions turned on within the container. It work well enough.

I think it's another workflow, that might suit your needs, but I think the real magic continues to be in the model. Similarly, I'm sure Claudia adds some nice window dressing.

Eventually folks will settle in on some local maxima for interaction and software development with LLMs. Who know what it will look like? It'd be nice if whatever comes next bumps the industry out of the current scrum and sprint style workflows, if only to break folks out of the theatrics of these software personas and rituals.

Here's my WIP: https://github.com/astral-drama/filter

I’ve used something similar, it’s a good workflow!

Hey, it's not well known but Anthropic actually publishes their own devcontainer feature layer for this (1). Many different CLI wrappers and tools are starting to imbed it (2) but is a nice DIY/open-source way to sandbox.

1. https://github.com/anthropics/devcontainer-features 2. shameless plug, my own open-source CLI for doing this: https://github.com/smithclay/claudetainer

Oof right on the edge of TM infringement with that name and color scheme. Actual instances of customer confusion being the litmus test.

Actual instance of customer confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44933795

Ah bummer for the creators. This’ll almost certainly result in them having to change their name. Thing is, it’s not malicious on Anthropic’s part if they do C&D them. It’s actually a requirement if they don’t want to risk losing their own mark.

I had to check on their Github to see that this wasn't an official tool.

I don't want to install a tool like this that isn't made by Anthropic.

I, too, find this confusing and actively dislike the naming and association here.

for info: "Claudia" as a name happens to be already in use by another open source project: Claudia the audio session management tool (for the JACK/LADISH APIs i.e. typically on Linux), part of the KxStudio audio tools suite by Filipe Coelho (falkTX) and the KxStudio community: https://kx.studio/Applications:Claudia

Nobody cares dude. It's a totally different thing. Names can overlap if the difference is obvious.

What people do care about is where names imply some relationship that isn't true. In this case the name Claudia strongly implies that this is an official Claude-related product. They'll get a cease and desist soon enough if this actually becomes popular.

I care. I like hearing about JACK tools, and hadn't previously heard of either Claudia or LADISH.

Thanks, OP!

I care, it's confusing

Personally I like the UI for https://conductor.build/ a lot more than this, although I'll have to give it a try.

I see a lot of commenters asking why a GUI is necessary. When you're running several agents in parallel it becomes very handy compared to the terminal. I can easily see the status of each which I haven't found a good equivalent for when using terminal tabs. Also it handles automatically creating git worktrees for each agent which is great.

Try not using tabs, that's my recommendation.

You can tile terminals, you can use things like tmux to insert multiple command lines into one window, etc.

I’ve been looking for something like this, but closer to the Claude Code philosophy of a strong, terminal-first workflow. What I really want is a "Claude Code Manager" that can spin up new git worktrees, manage multiple instances, and let me jump between them - no heavy UI abstraction.

I’ve noticed these UIs tend to strip away native features (plan mode, sub-agents etc.). A thin layer that preserves Claude Code’s built-ins while orchestrating instances, worktrees, and branches from the shell would be ideal for me.

Using "Beautifully and Elegant" on the website when everything is just obviously the most basic vibe coded sonnet 4 design is quite a statement.

I like that it's not mutually exclusive with normal Claude Code usage in terminal.

Question about Dashboard - I'm on subscription plan, and Dashboard shows - "Total Cost: $XX.YY". Is it somehow representitive towards how much credit I used in my plan, or it's just showing a costs it would take if I was using API instead?

Beware! This seems not robust at all right now. It seems to have bad problems with even simply managing an ongoing chat session. Yes, the simple task of keeping track of which messages belong to a session.. Which means that it randomly jumps back to earlier points in your conversation, with new messages simply getting lost or located in some random new session.

Go play with it, but don't use for important chats already.

This site could use about 2 thousand fewer words and perhaps one or two images…

Indicative of a lot of AI-generated content

There is no way this name sticks. I thought it was from anthropic at first

Not sure what problem it solves on top of Claude Code. I tried it a while back when this was posted but didn't find it very useful. This being a desktop app didn't make sense to me.

Many people don't like working in terminals. I'm not one of them, I live in a terminal--but those other people exist.

I use WARP.dev CLI terminal that works as a coding agent and has all the models not just from Anthropic and works very similarly to all the CLI Coding Agents (Claude code, Codex, Jules, etc.)

It works very fast compared to Cursor -- biggest limitation is that it doesn't have workspaces where you can get context from several repos for building your application.

MCP servers also work as well just a little more complex.

Warp can actually index your codebases and cross-reference across indexed repos for context: https://docs.warp.dev/code/codebase-context#multi-repo-conte... For example, if you reference the example repo in your prompt, the agent will use that in what it's working on in your current repo in coming up with code diffs and running commands

I simply tell Warp where to find the content. For example.. I created a Chrome extension boilerplate which sits in its own directory.

Then, when I create a new one, I tell Warp to use this folder as the boilerplate for the new one. It works perfectly.

So I tried it for a hot minute a few weeks ago, but uninstalled promptly once it looked like it just cannot handle pasted images very well at all. It would paste it as huge Base64 string right in there and completely lock up the UI on my MacBook Pro M3 Max. Has that been fixed? I'm really looking for a good IDE (or something better than just a terminal) for Claude Code, but I was left disappointed by Claudia...

This is what you're looking for https://conductor.build/

Well, my project is not using GitHub. Why does it need GitHub access?

I tried it some weeks ago, but I went back to the CLI. Honestly, I've been a GUI app for most of my life, preferring proper GUI tools to Terminal tools, including running the GUI versions of VIM and Emacs (during my brief emacs stint). However, over the past 2 weeks I've slowly transitioned to a full cli development setup with wezterm, neovim, lazygit, fzf, fish & Claude Code. I enjoy working like this so much.

> Honestly, I've been a GUI app for most of my life

Don't worry, someday you'll grow wiser and maybe you'll spend some time living as a CLI executable.

That video is horrible I have no idea what is going on.

One thing that I'm missing from all of those Claude Code wrappers is the ability to search/replace and edit code. I'm mostly "vibing" nowadays, but often I face situations that editing the code by myself is faster than explaining it the AI.

The first-party CC IDE integrations (Code, JetBrains) let you edit the diff under review prior to approval. Not sure if it feeds back to the thread as a correction, or just relies on CC reading the file next time it needs to

I am going to give it a try. I like the idea. One thing, slow down the main animation on your home page, like a lot. And add a about us and contact section to your webiste, you want to gain the trust of the visitors.

Part of the reason that I enjoy Claude code is because it has no GUI

I was thinking the same. I like that being in my terminal makes it feel closer to a build tool than not, because that's the space it fills for me. I like that, because it's a terminal, if I connect to my main machine through SSH, it's right there waiting for me. I'm not saying there isn't room in the world for both, but so far I haven't felt the need for a GUI tool in this space.

Did not realise this was a third party company until i read here, I'm very surprised they're allowed to get that close to the branding without an infringement.

for those interested in a native mac app for claude code: https://www.josh.ing/claudius

Sorry, i don't get who this is for. For those who want to use a CLI tool but don't like using a CLI? Also it's only for API metered use?

Loving all these Claude Code as a Platform products. Hope Anthropic doesn't ban them once they become popular citing some vague TOS violation.

Well that didn' take long. There are so many Editors and IDE's now. I wonder how many will survive a year from now.

The website somehow makes scrolling sort of stutter/hitch every few lines? I've never seen that before.

Thanks for sharing and looks like a tool with great potential. I miss a good vi editing mode.

interesting, does it let you manage multiple claude code agents without having to spin up different git worktrees? we were discussing the other day how that's an annoying limitation of claude code compared to codex, and the friction in having to manage those different worktrees feels just not quite worth it.

I just run them at the same time. As long as each instance is working in different parts of the codebase, there should be no problem. No worktrees needed!

> Claudia's Features: Everything You Need, Beautifully Designed

I’d really love to know what specifically about this is beautiful.

Steve Jobs says it and for 20+ years every tech bro parrots it mindlessly. “Oh do I think I did a good job on this? It must be beautifully designed.”

I agree, basically looks like a bootstrap website. Not the peak of beautiful design.

I need this in my IDE, not as a Web app.

Does the demo actually load for anyone else? I have no clue what this looks like without downloading.

Stuck at “Loading Claudia Demo…” in Safari

`Error: Problem parsing d="M 16.66% 50% L 83.33% 50%"`

This looks like it was written by Claude code as well as being for Claude code

Also saw this a couple months ago.

The wording is bit akward given that Claudia is a female given name: you can "see Claudia in action", "get started with Claudia", run things "in Claudia". At least Claude is an agent, so it makes sense to give it a human name (which btw is neutral: in France you have both men and women called "Claude").

Great design, but Vibe Kanban is a thing and it has a MCP server.

"Terminal chaos?"

Yes, please :)

Here's my personal workflow. I've built a relatively small (<5k LoC Go) CLI to facilitate it. Mostly vibe coded in a dogfooded fashion.

When I want to start an agent, I run a small command that takes in a prompt (and some optional flags but mostly the defaults are what I want). It does this: 1. Check out a worktree from a repo (defaults to my bread and butter repo with completions for the most active ~5 repos in my org) 2. Craft a command to launch an agent (supports codex, opencode, and gemini-cli because my company only gives us OpenAI keys). 3. Launch the command in a tmux session. 4. Exit 0.

There are some light integrations with Jira, GitHub, etc but they're accomplished by shelling out to other tools.

If I want to manage sessions, I've got tmux + fzf + other unixy tools old & new to manage them.

If I want to manage sessions remotely, there is vibetunnel. It would be cool to have a slicker AFK experience, but it works.

My silly little piece of vibe coded slop and duct tape, for my use case, is largely competitive with most of the offerings on the market, outside of the ones that do cloud-based environments. Some of these projects are VC funded teams of people working full time, I'm assuming. What a time to be alive.

I'm also amazed at how readily projects like this just embrace Claude Code lock-in. Is there really anything specific about it that other agent harnesses don't support? I haven't used it yet, but so far it just seems like it benefits in mindshare alone from being the default/first mover, not because it supports any particular feature the others do not. TBF I do hear that it is quite good.

Quality & polish is a compelling reason to _use_ something, but it's not a compelling reason to build walls IMO, especially in a space like this where context engineering techniques, prompts, etc are in no way secret sauce and can be readily copied.

Doesn’t make any sense to me. GUIs are discoverability tools. LLMs are essentially a runtime with a natural language interface. Why would it need a GUI wrapper? By definition its discoverability is already 100%.

> LLMs are essentially a runtime with a natural language interface

LLMs are that, but claude code is not.

I really just want a UI to integrate this into VSCode...

So, Cline.

In Electron, apparently, then provide a URL instead.

all these tools just assume claude code, even though what they do is piping input into a cli that doesn't have to be claude.

I just claude would'nt be so slooooow...

Is this usable with local inference?

what are some of the agents that people have built using Claude?

No Windows support :(

There's Github issues mentioning windows so someone is trying to build it.

But yeah - I need to bounce between multiple OS so I avoid tools that don't run on all major desktop platforms.

I was invited to be a beta user by Anthropic who is releasing this - FYI

What what? Are they working on a proper GUI? This is actually massive if true

So it's made by another company but "released" by Anthropic? What does that mean?

This is not made by Anthropic. You are either seriously misinformed, or lying

i don't want to be a boomer but their is a reason for cc to be a terminal experience. why do you even want to use it via GUI?

Been using Claude almost daily but can't understand the use case of this program? Seems like a step backwards?

Love the name

I first read chlamydia…

Never heard of Claudia Schiffer?

For folks interested in options for working with teams of agents like Claude Code in parallel, we're building Magnet

-----

Magnet - The AI workspace for agentic coding

http://www.magnet.run

------

You can think of Magnet as your workspace for collaborating with your human & AI agent team mates. We let you quickly spin up Claude Code sandboxes for every issue, and we're also thinking about how AI can be more of a thought partner in building high-quality software.

We're thinking about this problem space more broadly than just trying to be a GUI for Claude Code (though that's already a great starting point).

These are a few of the themes we think about:

- How can we use AI to help you think critically about the features you're prioritizing and what to build next?

- How can we always assemble and provide exactly the right context for every issue you're working on?

- What are the best patterns for collaborating with your human & AI teammates, to ship the highest quality code?

- How can you best specify exactly what you want, and verify that it's what you hoped for?

Would love for y'all to try it, and I'll post a video of me building a product with Magnet a little later here - the tool's getting really fun to use!

We're also very open to feedback and try to incorporate learnings quickly! I spent a large part of this weekend using Magnet to fix most of the issues someone we onboarded Friday brought up

Love it but I want an iOS companion app over Tailscale/LAN. Omnara without a central server.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com