The reason there is so much noise in is area is because these tools are a dime a dozen and trivial to create with AI. I don’t think it realistic anymore to expect a rush of users and make money off of these. The supply is going to far outstrip the demand.
Last Saturday I asked Claude to create a Claude Code clone for me with a few customizations that I personally prefer. It did so in less than an hour, and works just as well as Claude Code. I’m not looking for attention on it - I’m happy I made it, and just myself as a user is gratification enough. I think this is the future of software development, and I think having expectations of attention from others just because you made another tool is setting yourself up for disappointment.
Like many things I've made, this started as a scratch-an-itch project, but now feels like it's unique and useful to enough people that it's worth a shot at turning it into a business. Exactly how to monetise it, not sure, but regardless of that step, step 1 is definitely just getting it out there!
There's a lot of "What's the point in making an app, one day we'll just ask claude for the tools we want and it'll write them in a weekend" but I think: a) For things like this you're going to get a better result by taking an app that's roughly the right shape, but customisable, and asking claude to customise it b) If we do end up in a world where nobody sells software apart from openAI and Anthropic, then that's a bad, bad place to be
It looks like a good system, great if it works for you - but we now live in a period where I could build a similar tool to handle MY preferences in a weekend if I wanted to.
And, it would almost be EASIER than learning to use a new tool. I prefer PI because I didn't want batteries included in the terminal. Any decisions about what a user might want is a decision made on the user's behalf that dilute that core.
Juggler looks good - not personally for me. But that's OK, it's got 675 stars and a bunch of forks. That's attention, no?
It's true: with proper planning, thought, and focus, you might be able to generate enough code in one weekend to create a tool that is at parity with something like Pi - but chances are the amount of focus, planning, and thought is going to be greater than one weekend worth. And I don't know about you - but I don't really want to spend my weekend building a coding harness, I have other ideas and projects I'd rather execute.
I’m not exaggerating when I say all I had to do was prompt “build me an LLM coding harness like Claude code, but make it so that I can resume sessions from OpenCode and Pi as well” and that’s it, and it was done within an hour.
Did it have warts? It’s been working nearly flawlessly, but there have been a couple of really minor things. One of the things I realized quickly was that it didn’t have a WebFetch tool built in, so I prompted “add a webfetch tool” and it did it within 5 minutes. Warts are trivially fixed.
The things that really differentiate software now are the ideas behind them, not the implementation. So if (like the OP) you’re looking at a tool and going “well mine does that too…”, so what? If it’s just a re-implementation of the same ideas, anyone can recreate it (and add on their own customizations to boot).
Personally, I am getting frustrated with the amount of people trying to pitch me their tool they made. Tools are a dime a dozen. Share with me your ideas, and I’ll share with you mine, but I’m not gonna adopt your tool.
Sure, and then tomorrow it's compaction, then worktrees, then an annoying buffer scrolling bug, image clipboard handling, etc etc. I don't buy for a minute that a one-liner prompt creates a perfect program because I know from experience it doesn't. You are inheriting the maintenance of a non-trivial program. That's perfectly fine if you want to tinker and spend time on that but I would rather offload that to someone who wants to spend more time thinking about those problems than I do.
> Personally, I am getting frustrated with the amount of people trying to pitch me their tool they made. Tools are a dime a dozen. Share with me your ideas, and I’ll share with you mine, but I’m not gonna adopt your tool.
I'm not sure I follow this line of thinking. Obviously, juggler is the result of an author who has spent a great deal amount of time thinking about an idea. It is the manifestation of the author's ideas. I agree that the amount of vibe coded slop out there that people think is marketable is ridiculous, but Juggler doesn't really look like that. It's still worthwhile to evaluate well thought out tools IMO.
Every thing you listed works out of the box. Believe it or not, it’s true! And creating tools like this is only going to get easier as LLM models progress.
Your comment very much reminds me of comments from 2023 saying that LLMs would never be able to write working code, or be able to generate lifelike pictures, or be able to find security issues… but look around you, they’re doing all of those things already!
> I'm not sure I follow this line of thinking. Obviously, juggler is the result of an author who has spent a great deal amount of time thinking about an idea.
Awesome! That’s why I asked the author why they wanted attention. I want to hear more about those ideas behind juggler. What makes it special? Why does the author (who has tons of experience in software) think juggler is different? What were the obstacles that the author overcame while building it? That’s what I want to know, but these comments share none of that. Instead they just say “I also built a tool that does the same thing, I wish people would use my tool instead.” Why in the world would I?
- a multi-client, state-machine based architecture rather than a naive LLM loop
- a bunch of UX features that I wasn't seeing in other harnesses (although of course they're all churning away in terms of UX so this changes all the time)
The difficult bits were:
- getting the data model right. This was a lot harder than it looks!
- getting an automated UI test framework in place that was robust enough to trust that incoming changes wouldn't break something. Originally I hoped to get away without this (I've never worked on a project before where we had automated UI tests!) but it was just a shitshow. I spent a couple of months getting this right, but it turned the whole project around and it's now incredibly quick and safe to make changes.
Fwiw, as a terminal-dweller I have trialled cmux - it didn't hit the spot for me obviously, but I filed as away as a tool to recommend to my wife/siblings who are pretty technical but don't code, but want to dip their toes in this age of llms. That's a growing demographic I haven't really seen many tools trying to serve - Juggler's not explicitly aimed at that market but it looks much much better suited than cmux or other guis I've seen, so I'll probably be giving it a go.