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AI and Programming Part 2

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    Name
    Tienshiao Ma
    Twitter

I got a 3D printer a couple of years ago. One joke about 3D printing is that you just spend a bunch of time (and money) printing stuff for your 3d printer.

If you hang out in the AI/LLM programming subreddits, you'll see the same applies with AI and programming. All the devs are empowered to build a tool that works just the way they want. A popular category is orchestration tools, tools that help you use Claude Code more effectively. I am not immune to this desire.

I have built two:

  • Voom - A tool to help me code review changes locally. I usually do my code review in Bitbucket or GitHub, so using a similar web interface puts me in the right frame of mind. Prior to building the tool, sometimes I'd commit, push, and open a draft PR just so I could review larger sets of changes. Voom saves me from all that work, polluting the remote, and also makes it easier to send that feedback back to the agent. But I haven't used it as much lately, because I built ...
  • CodeToaster - I usually have a handful of Claude Codes running and as an Arc browser fan I wanted a terminal with vertical tabs. I had used some other similar apps but they often dependend on tmux. I'm not a tmux user normally and would prefer not having to use tmux. CodeToaster is a terminal multiplexer with a browser UI. You can connect to your terminal sessions from multiple devices at the same time (I often checkin on my phone -- it's not yet fully mobile friendly but at least the terminal aspects generally work). The tabs show the statuses of the sessions (idle, busy, waiting for user) and support notifications as well. Supports pasting image and dragging/dropping files also. I stopped using Voom because it is now built into CodeToaster and I've switched over to running my Claude Code sessions in CodeToaster pretty nearly exclusively.

CodeToaster works really well for me right now. And when I say "right now" I mean at this moment in time. I'm still very much orchestrating my agents but I'm not sure that will be the case in 6 months. Many people have built similar UIs -- the Claude Code GUI app, OpenAI's Codex app, etc. They have tabs/chats/sessions on the left, and chat is still the primary UI and maybe some affordances around reviewing code. But these are all UIs for today's workflows. What will UIs look like for tomorrow's workflows, when we won't need to be nearly as hands on?

As an aside: both Voom and CodeToaster are implemented in Bun because Bun makes it really easy to build a server with a React frontend, and compile it into one executable. I'm inclined to build more things similarly.