[commandar]

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."

[marxism]

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

[rolls-reus]

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!

[iambateman]

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

[zblevins]

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.

[TheTaytay]

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.

[on_meds]

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.

[TheTaytay]

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

[marxism]

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.

[marxism]

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.

[raincole]

> 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.)

[commandar]

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.

[turtlebits]

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.

[latexr]

> 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.

[herval]

> 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

[latexr]

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”.

[Aeolun]

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.

[dgunay]

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.

[int_19h]

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.

[rsanheim]

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.

[Aeolun]

> 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.

[threecheese]

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)?

[rblatz]

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.

[commandar]

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).

[dottjt]

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.

[block_dagger]

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

[kristo]

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.

[cameronh90]

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.

[kordlessagain]

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.

[ubercow13]

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

[ramoz]

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.

[commandar]

>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.

[petesergeant]

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.

[commandar]

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.

[qcnguy]

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.

[zarzavat]

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.

[unethical_ban]

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.

[mikestaas]

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

[omneity]

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.

[unethical_ban]

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.

[maxsilver]

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.

[taneq]

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

[calvinmorrison]

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.

[bigyabai]

> 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.

[robwwilliams]

Wait, aren’t you describing Dropbox?

[mccoyb]

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.

[msikora]

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.

[noodletheworld]

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.

[scottgg]

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

[commandar]

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.

[scottgg]

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.

[rovr138]

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

[commandar]

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.

[breakfastduck]

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'.

[commandar]

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.

[serf]

"agnostically gnostic".

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

[OJFord]

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.

[paulddraper]

> 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

[keyle]

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.

[yieldcrv]

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

[wisemang]

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.

[ako]

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.

[johnisgood]

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.

[rbren]

> 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".

[lerp-io]

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

[arunc]

May I know what the other 2 tools are?

[marxism]

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.

[jessmartin]

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.

[ukuina]

OpenAI Codex is available on the mobile app.

[CjHuber]

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

[rovr138]

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