I built a better Claude Code and Codex app

I've tried a lot of Agentic development environments over the past 12 months or so. From Cursor to Codeex to Claw Desktop to T3 Code, and they've all been good in their various ways, [music] but to be honest, none of them have like really nailed the experience that I'm personally looking for. [music] And I don't know about you guys, but I'm spending more and more time inside of one of these ADES these days. [music] It's probably my single most used app at this point. So, seeing as I've been on a bit of a tear lately writing my own apps [music] for like everything, I thought it'd be kind of stupid not to spend some time in tokens trying to create, you know, the perfect software development environment for me. [music] So, here it is. It's called Threadbear. And I know this is going to sound a little bit bragging, but [laughter] I think to [music] be honest, it's probably one of the best things I've created in a very long time. I I am super happy with this. There's so many really cool features in here that just make sense. From getting to your next decision as fast as possible to changing literally anything you like about it to having all of your threads and context and everything synced across, you know, desktop, browser, and your mobile phone thanks to the power of Convex. And the awesome news is I'm making it all freely available from today so you can download and try it out yourself. But hang on, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you rush off and click that download link that I've left in the description, I want to just quickly take you through some of the stuff that I think is really special in Threadbear. So, without further ado, make sure you grab yourself a lovely cup of tea and I'm going to take you guys through threadbear. So, what we're looking at here is the front end for Threadbear. It's a MacOSS native app, so the performance is super fast and that was one of the critical things I wanted. I wanted to make it feel really fast and there's no lag and there's no like slight micro annoyances you get with like laggy apps. And yes, I'm sorry Windows users. I used to be one of you guys and I really have gone to the dark side now. So if you want a Windows version or a Linux version of this, then I thoroughly encourage you to try and spend some tokens and build it. I personally would love to see it and I will promote it if you build it. But anyways, at first glance, it should be pretty familiar to you if you've used another ADE like claw desktop codeex or T3 code or something like that. On the left, you know, we've got our threads, which we'll take a look at a bit deeper in a minute because you probably already noticed something different from other ADEs. Um, but in the middle, we've got our new thread, or if I click a thread, you'll see, you know, it's got all the messages uh that I've been working with with the agent on. And on the right hand side, we got something a bit new. So [music] this is where things start to depart from normal ads a little bit. So this whole right hand side is um context specific depending upon the thread that you're looking at. So you see as I change the threads here the highlights section here changes. And also you'll see in this quick view here these are what's called patches. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about patches later. So just pin that thought for now. [music] But the highlight section basically gathers all the kind of important information about the current thread or the project that you're currently working on. I built an entire docking system in Swift for this. Believe it or not, this doesn't seem to really exist for Swift docking system, but I really wanted it because I wanted to be able to rearrange panels [music] to however I or you see fit. Now, when you start a new thread, this will probably look quite familiar to you. you know, you got, you know, your uh model selector here. Now, this left hand side might look a little bit different, but I'll talk more about what pools are in a little bit, but what I want to show here is a little innovation that I really wanted in here, which is you'll note that there's no project or folder selection when you start a new thread. Because to be honest, I think project selectors were a nice idea when I first saw them in in codeex or claw desktop. But as models got smarter, I just found that I was any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any end any up just like picking no project or I was picking like a [music] MISK project or something like that cuz I just wanted to get on with the process of the idea that I had. Now that's not to say there isn't a concept of projects in threadbear. There are that's what these little icons are. They are threads that belong to a project. If I go to the project section here you can see I've got 76 projects. [music] uh you can scroll down uh and go through them if you want, but the key thing is that you don't have to select it when you start a new thread. Threadbear just manages all that kind of housekeeping faf for you. So you don't need to [music] manually select it yourself. The way that it does that is is through something called the librarian. I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but basically it kind of plays sweeper for you. Going through your threads, watching what you're doing, updating the thread, putting it in the right project, keeping the context up to date, etc. So, let's just start off by creating a quick new thread. Please tell me about the various projects and things that I'm currently working on. And yeah, as I said before, what you're looking at here is just the front end to thread bear. I can close the window and exit Threadbear entirely and come back into it. And you'll see that it's still running the old threads. um [music] it picks it up because what actually does the work, what actually kicks off the codeex or the clawed harnesses [music] is actually running in a separate process called the runner that the [music] front end just communicates with. Well, actually it communicates with the runner, but it also communicates with a convex deployment which allows us to have both web views and mobile views [music] and having cloud runners and various other things. I'll talk more about the runners and the convex side in a little bit. Right. So now you got a little taste for what Threadbearer is. I want to now kind of like take you through like a day-to-day process. So hopefully I can convey some of the other really nice little productivity features that I've added that I personally think just make sense. Okay. So when I wake up in the morning, I might see something like this. I have an inbox full of threads that have completed overnight that are waiting for me. And I can go in and click on one. So for example, I'm working on this uh interview that I did with James a few months ago. I have the agent working through the video in tandem. You can see straight away there's a few things going on here. So, we'll talk about this bar in a minute, but we have this decisions panel. And this is one of the key [snorts] things I wanted to introduce into uh Threadbear. So, I talked about this in a previous video recently, but I think one of the key things that we as humans have blocking us with making us more productive these [music] days is how fast can we make decisions? How fast can we get just the right amount of context into our brain? so that we can make a decision so then the work can progress can the thread which is effectively the work can progress on to [music] the next step and the way that I was doing that before threadbear is I had this part in a clawed prompt or codeex prompt which said at write a needs you section and what that basically means is that all you need to do is look at that needs you section as long as you understand what it's asking you [music] then you can just say one do this two do that there's a whole video I did on it you can I'll link it down below [music] but basically this is the evolution of that it's a UI that effectively is that. So, it says for this step of the video, it wants me to pick a a shorts layout in the review window. And notice that it gives me a nice handy link. So, if I click that, it's going to open up another feature which Threadbear has, which is a comparison panel. So, this comparison panel is is very critical to the way that I work. When I'm not sure about something, how something should look, I like to have the model uh show me a few different options, then I can choose one. So you can see here it's asking me for how the shorts version of uh the James interview should look. So should I do it like this? Should I do it like that? Should I do it like this? And then I can just pick one and I could uh add some extra notes if I wanted to do that. But note there's actually three questions that it's asking me here. So once I've picked one of those, it'll go on to the next question. It's asking me, you know, should it start cutting up in the first six uh batch of six shorts from [music] that big interview? And I can say, yeah, go ahead. And then it's asking me for the full length video, the full length um interview. Should I upload the 4K version to YouTube right right away? And I could say, "Yeah, go ahead and do that." [music] And just notice how it gives me just enough context. And if if I didn't have enough, like on the first step, it often provides me links that I can just click and it'll scroll up to where it means for the extra context or allows it to open something up. So this just allows me to very quickly iterate on a thread, kick it off, and then and then go on to the next piece of work while it works in the background. Now, I'll just quickly talk about these here. So these are what's known as patches. [music] Patches I will talk more about later, but they're one of the key fundamental parts of threadbear, which is allows you to create your own tooling per project, per tool, per thread even. Because this one, for example, is using Tandem, it's provided me a nice handy dandy link that I can click the button to open up entered straight into [music] Tandem, which is my own video editor. See past video on this. Okay. Now, if there is no other work to do, let me try and find. Here we go. This one that we asked for. Um, tell me about the various projects I'm working on. If there is no follow-up work to be done on this particular thread, it just says done. And then I can just archive it. And then it just goes into the archive. Note as well that nice little animation. I wanted little bits of juice like that in the application because like I said we spend so much time inside these ads they might as well feel delightful to use you know. Okay. Also note on the left hand side here um this is very important as well. I wanted to not be overwhelmed by the amount of work. So in other ads like codeex or claude they put all the threads together and it can get really overwhelming. You got so much going on and you can't tell which of these things I should be focusing on at any one time. So, when you start kicking off a piece of work, let me see if I can find one I can kick off like this one. I'll just say, is there anything else that we need to do here? I can just kick that off and it disappears from this list. So, I now know I don't need to handle that until it comes back in again. And it just sits here in this running section. You can see I've got a couple of the uh bits of work that are going off in the background here. So, it sits in there and usually I don't need to expand that running section. I don't really care. And I can just move on to the next thread. Okay. Then, so this one's come [music] back and says, "No, there's nothing else in there." So, I can just say, "All right, archive." and it's [music] done. So, here's another example. This is uh for Walkies, a mobile app that uh gifies walking effectively. Um it's asking me, can you unlock your iPhone and leave it on your desk uh for about 10 minutes? So, it can measure the battery cost of the [music] new features that it's working on. Sure, no problem. I can do that. It's unlock now. Go. And then just goes off and then I start on the next one. Now, in this thread, you'll notice that it says done, but there's also this carry-on section. So, this is important because often there is follow-up work that the thread has realized needs that could potentially happen, but it's not essential. It's not like optional work once it's finished its current set of work. For example, this video that we're doing right now, I'm I'm working on in this thread. And it's flagged that potentially we could start drafting the title and the thumbnail options while we're editing this video. And I could say, "Sure, go ahead." And I could just click that. or if I didn't understand what it is, I can click this question mark and then it will explain [music] to me what it means by that. There you go. So, it's going to go away and start thinking about thumbnails and titles for this video. So, that's kind of just how I use it from day to day. I I try and keep this inbox as empty as I can and I just slowly work through, make a decision, move on to the next one, make a decision, move on to the next one, make a decision, move on to the next one, or start a new thread or I get the threads themselves [music] to kick off new threads, etc. Now, one feature that I have borrowed from T3 Code is this uh hibernation. So you can click on that and you can effectively this is the same thing as T3 code snooze it this thread for a certain amount of time or you can even say wake when and you can put in your own words when it should wake up and then a small model will choose an appropriate time or we'll just continue to monitor and then wake that up when appropriate. Okay, so let's talk about the librarian a little bit. So, I mentioned it briefly before, but you can see in here we've got a whole bunch of work that the librarian is doing. So, it goes through um currently [music] working threads and past threads and just does all of that admin work so you don't have to ever worry about it. And it also just tries to improve your process as it goes along. So, it notices when you're doing something repeatedly or getting annoyed with something and will kick off a new thread to suggest uh that you fix that. And that's one of the key things with threadbear is that I want it to feel like it's entirely customizable and you can change it as you go from within it. So it can edit itself. It's very meta, I know, but it's super powerful being able to edit your own tools like this from within the tool itself. [music] And I've put a lot of work into making it so that the update process is entirely seamless. You just kind of ask for a change, it does it, and then it updates the UI and it updates the runners as needed. So I've just clicked down here, this update section. You can see the app itself. I.e. the UI is up to date. I've got the little tutorial system there. Uh the app is update. [music] The runner is waiting for uh one thread to finish before it can update. [music] Some threads can be on one runner versions. Other threads can be on another runner version. It's fine. But it just means that the runner is always kind of like a moving target because it has to wait for some other threads to finish before it can upgrade upgrade itself. [music] Another thing that I borrowed from T3 Code that I really like is keeping the providers, you know, the clawed code and the codecs up to date. So, it just does that automatically for you in the background. You don't need to worry about it. You can change it if you want to, of course. There's also another section here where we'll talk about a little bit about the my philosophy around how I get this threadbear into your hands and also keep it updated with updates, but still allowing you to customize it however you [music] want. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. Now, one of the first things I wrote down to look at when I first started working on Threadbear was a problem that I was kind of having with my laptop and my entire agentic process. [music] You see, my laptop would often go to sleep and this is where like a lot of my threads were working and I didn't want to do the full jump [music] to cloud agents for various reasons that I'll talk about another time. And the problem is when I go out, I often there's there's moments where I'm like, "Oh, what was that thing that I was talking about on my phone? I need that context. Like I go to the post office and I need a a specific code so I can post something off like oh what was it? I open up my phone and then I haven't got the context there because my laptop's gone to sleep. It's just like super frustrating. [music] So for Threadbear I wanted to make sure that I had a first class mobile experience. So that's what I built. So if you go into uh the settings you can go to phone and browser and you get a QR code. Then you can download the Threadbear app from the Apple App Store. Click scan this code, [music] point it at the QR code, and then bam, you've got all your threads there immediately. And it's super quick to use. You open it and immediately loads everything exactly as you'd expect. And the same kind of experience, but tailored for mobile. And even if my laptop was to go to sleep and shut down, then it wouldn't be a problem because all your threads are synced to a convex deployment that you control. This is the key thing. It's not me, not Mike can. I don't, you know, I'm not stealing all your data or anything. It's a convex deployment that you set up when you first set up threadbear. So, for example, like I said, I so I can copy this, copy this web link here, and I can paste it. So, for every thread, you'll see in my case, it's opulent moose 249, but every thread has got a web page that that is also very useful for sharing. So, if you want to share a thread with a friend, colleague, family member, whatever, then you can. But the key thing is that this is all powered by Convex. So it means that if your laptop goes to sleep, then your phone is still always going to work. [music] And I've also done it in a way that it uses hardly any data. So it uses the minimal amount of data. So this will fit on a convex free plan very very easily, very comfortably. I'll just quickly show you the ConX dashboard actually. So there you go. This is the uh Convex deployment. You can [music] go into your data and you can see all the bits and pieces you want in here. Um your scheduled tasks, you know, messages, devices, things like that. And the key is that it doesn't upload all of your thread information. It uploads just the latest set of messages that are needed to keep things [music] fast. Most of the thread context gets synced directly from your phone or from the runner to where it's needed and doesn't go through convex. It does this because I'm not sure if you looked at your agentic output logs how big they are. They're like tens of gigabytes [music] when you take into account all the tool calls and images and everything else that it pulls in. it would just [music] be too much to do through Convex. It would be get too expensive. So, it keeps only what it needs inside of [music] Convex and then syncs everything through to your phone. Another really nice thing that I wanted inside of here is this up here is the pockets section. [music] So, up here is like what the librarian is keeping for you is a set of uh [music] cards for important information that you are going to want when you're out and about. So, you don't have to go digging through to find the thread that was important. Another way of doing that as well potentially is if you have got a thread that you're working on like for example my woodworking project when I kick it off I don't want it to go disappear into running. So what I've added is if I hold down a thread I can click star and now it goes into a special starred section and you can see it immediately updated on the desktop as well. It goes in the special starred section. So now if I kick off something then it will stay in the start section and not go into running. But yeah [music] it everything works as you would expect it to. You can take photos and dictate as you might expect. Kick it off and you should see the thread show up in runningings. Yeah, there it is. And there's the photo. So, it all just works seamlessly and is really really powerful and really easy. I haven't seen this this seamless nature in any of the ades whether T3 code or codeex or claude or any any of them. It's just a very powerful quick way of working. And I really do use the mobile version quite a lot now because it's just so pleasant to use. For example, for my phone the other day, um I was getting really annoyed with Apple's dictation being inaccurate. So I decided to make my own uh keyboard for it using Whisper Flow. And [music] uh I did it all I built the entire process thing from my phone in a few hours which is just incredible to be honest. Or for example like the other day I was um teaching my son how to ride a bike and I wanted to know how I can take off the pedals off his bike. So, I just sent it a few photos for my phone and I got it to make me a nice little animation showing how. And it it all just worked beautifully on [music] the phone. And again, like this all wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for Convex being the man in the middle that allows me to do real time syncing of all my threads from my desktop, from my runners, from the web, from the mobile, all kind of synced together nicely. And one thing I haven't done a lot of yet, um, is you can choose the location where you want this work to run. [music] So in the future I can imagine me kicking off more work uh to be done on server instances a bit like you know Amps orbs. Right now I only have this Mac or Bruce. Bruce is [music] like my one of my Mac minis inside my computer inside my house. So you can kick off a thread to work on another location. It doesn't have to be on the runner that's running on your laptop for example. This is really handy for schedules for example. I didn't even talk about schedules. Um you can create [music] a schedule thread to run or a schedule script to run at a certain time or a cron job. [music] And this these schedules functions can be just like in convex they can run on any runner. They can be targeted to any runner. So it could be on your laptop or it could be on Bruce or it could be in the cloud. Whatever runners you've got set up it can run there. So it means that even if my laptop crashes goes away or whatever then the work can continue on in another location. Right? This is one of the things that I'm most excited about and one of the key things that I wanted to build into Threadbear. So, you might not know this about me, but most of my career has been in game development and I've spent a lot of time in the game development environment called Unity. And I used to love Unity because if you've ever used Unity, one of the best things about it is that you're encouraged to change the editor yourself. [music] So you can add your own little panels and windows and menus and tools or whatever for making your specific game development process easier for you and your team. And I've wanted that for, you know, a general coding environment for a very long time. And now with threadbear, you can basically do it on steroids. So remember at the start I mentioned these custom panels. [music] So these are called patches. And you might be sort of getting the idea of why it's called threadbear now is because of this idea of patching your bear, you know. So a patch is basically [music] just a little TypeScript file that lives in athreadbear folder inside of your project. [music] Inside of there, you can add buttons, panels, do whatever you want in there. So for example, on this one, this walks thread, I've got quite a number of different patches up here. I've got one for convex. So you see I've got like this uh convex one that's baked into um Threadbear itself. So this allows you to see your let me just make it a bit bigger. There we go. You can choose your deployment. So for I can see my Walkie's deployment. I can see the development or the production instance. I can go and see my data. I can see the health whatever whatever. But then if I also wanted more narrow data. So I could have the my actual walkie stats and I can drag that down here. I could put that here. So three people have installed walkies, been on 43 walks in 48 suburbs and found 32 secrets. Or for example, there's a tandem one here. So I've done done a video on it. So, it's told me about various things that need to be reviewed in the video [music] for it. But yeah, it basically you can make these to do whatever you want to make your process and your flow while working on a given project easier. You can see that's what these buttons are down here as well. It's just little um handy buttons that the patches added that allows me to quickly get to [music] whatever you need in uh for your project or tool. Okay, so hopefully I've sold you on the idea of this now. So remember that download link I mentioned at the start. Well, [music] it's actually not really a download link at all. It's actually a prompt that gets your agent to install it for you. And you what you do is you paste that into clawed code or codeex or whatever you want. And what it's going to go ahead and do is first make sure that you are happy with what it's going to do and there's no malicious stuff inside there. So you have to be careful when you have somebody like me or anybody really tell you just to run some random prompt and you know [music] install some random thing for you obviously. So make sure that you're happy with that prompt and happy with the thing that it's going to do first. So that's the very first thing it does. [music] And then what it goes ahead and does once it's once you're happy with it, there's nothing malicious in there and your agent's happy with it, it's going to go ahead and fork the repo. Now this is this is critical. It doesn't [music] download an application. It forks the source code itself. Then it's going to walk you through the process of creating your own convex deployment, which is where you know all your threads and state and everything else is going to be stored for you on your own convex account. Then once you've gone through a few different questions, it's going to fire up the threadbear instance itself, the UI, and then there's a nice little tutorial system that guides you through a lot of the stuff that we've already talked about in this video. Now, updates. So, if you've made changes to your forked version, how are you going to get updates from me? If I've noticed some bugs in threadbear or come up with some really cool feature, how are you going to get those updates? What it does is it's going to publish a release once a day if there is an update [music] then in your version of threadbear in that update section on the left hand side it's going to tell you that there's some updates waiting for you and give you the option to bring them in. That's going to then kick off a thread. It's going to go through and work out how to merge in my changes into your version and it'll let you know whether there's going to be any conflicts or incompatibilities or anything with the stuff that you've done in your version. I think of this as like kind of a new way of distributing software. It's kind of like a forking but also kind of like where you can still get updates from the project maintainer. The beauty of this is obviously is that if you want something different in your version of threadbear just do it. You don't need to wait for me. just have kick off another thread in and just say make the change, you know. So that's threadbear. I do hope you like it. I am very proud of this one. More and more of my day now is just making decisions and moving on to the next [music] thing. And like I said at the start, if you're going to spend all day in one app, you want it to work exactly how you want it to for how your brain works so you can make your decisions as quickly as you [music] can. So I'm curious, are you going to try this out? And if you are, what is the first thing that you're going to change about [music] your copy of Threadbear? Let me know in the comments down below. But anyways, I think that's all I have for you guys for now. I'm definitely going to be talking about Threadbear more in the future, but for now, just please do drop me a like and sub. And until next time, thanks for watching. Cheerio.