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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 to
by commandar 1y ago
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."
- scottgg 1y agoI’m assuming/hoping this is gonna end up as regular plugins for existing IDEs
- commandar 1y agoThat'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 1y agoDidn’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 1y agoNot 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
- serf 1y ago"agnostically gnostic". you give up one side of freedom (the ide) for the other (the backend).
- commandar 1y agoIf 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 1y agoThere 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 1y agoThe 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.
- raincole 1y ago> 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 1y agoTo 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 1y agoIf 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 1y ago> 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 1y ago> 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
- yieldcrv 1y agoI 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 1y agoMy (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.
- paulddraper 1y ago> 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
- mccoyb 1y agoThere'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.
- ramoz 1y agoAnd 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.
- bigyabai 1y ago> 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 1y agoWait, aren’t you describing Dropbox?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zarzavat 1y agoI'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 1y agoI 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.
- arunc 1y agoMay I know what the other 2 tools are?
- marxism 1y agoIf 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/#quick-comparison-table https://happy.engineering/docs/comparisons/alternatives/#qui... There are more more desktop apps, probably because those are easier to design.
- jessmartin 1y agoHas 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 1y agoOpenAI Codex is available on the mobile app.
- ako 1y agoAs 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 1y agoYeah, 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.
- Aeolun 1y agoI 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dgunay 1y agoClaude 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.
- threecheese 1y agoThere’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 1y agoWhile 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 1y agoRoo 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).
- marxism 1y agoI'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/ 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-claude-code/ https://happy.engineering/docs/features/voice-coding-with-cl... [1] https://github.com/slopus/happy https://github.com/slopus/happy
- iambateman 1y agoWoah, cool! Having a phone connection to Claude code is something I’ve been looking for
- zblevins 1y agoI 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 1y agoYou 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.
- msikora 1y agoThe 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 1y agoIs 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.
- rbren 1y ago> 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".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- keyle 1y agoThese 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.
- lerp-io 1y agodeleted roo code vs code extension as soon as i tried claude code, ppl really need to stop trying to extend the editor lol
- CjHuber 1y agoI mean technically you can use Claude Code Router and then use any LLM with Claudia
- rovr138 1y agoHave you tried claude code router? Looking at all the options, trying to see what would be a good configuration example.
- johnisgood 1y agoYeah, 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.