Claude and I built an app

# Claude and I built an app Source: [https://folkwolf.net/claude-and-i-built-an-app/](https://folkwolf.net/claude-and-i-built-an-app/) Announcing[Roboterm](https://github.com/mattrose/roboterm)\. It’s a minmal terminal emulator that basically does what I want, and not much else\. It supports tabs, and split panes\. There were a few motivators for me to write it, if you can call it that\. The first was that I simply wanted to write a terminal emulator that I wanted to use\. I’ve maintained[Terminator](https://github.com/gnome-terminator/terminator)for over 5 years now, and I like it and still use it, but it’s macos integration isn’t great and I have stopped using Linux on the desktop completely in favour of MacOS\. Even though Terminator is still designed around systems administrators who log into dozens if not hundreds of servers a day, my workload doesn’t really fit that mold\. I wanted something different\. I also wanted to see working examples of python gtk4 code on macos\. The terrible macos integration on Terminator has always bothered me, and I couldn’t find any examples of python gtk code that ran well on a mac that I could follow\. Also, I wanted to update Terminator to GTK4, so I wanted to have a**good**example of Python GTK4 code that worked seamlessly on a mac\. Lastly, I wanted to test out the abilities of AI\. I have tried to have AI write this code for a few years now\. Every 6 months or so, I would pick up whatever the best, latest AI coding tool and tried to code, basically, this\. Up until last month, I gave up in frustration\. This was written using claude tui\. Just telling claude what I wanted, and had it write most of the code\. It was fairly slow going at first, until I figured out how to work with claude, and claude was able to build up a good CLAUDE\.md\. Now it’s fairly smooth to add new features\. This has been a real education in the ability of AI\. In some ways, it is a much better coder than I am, it writes far more thorough tests, and documents it’s decisions in CLAUDE\.md, leaving me with something that I can easily read and make sense of\. The entirety of the python code is less than 2000 lines for a fairly capable terminal emulator\. It has also allowed me to produce decent code without getting into a “flow state”\. I can sit in the evening and watch TV with my wife and direct claude at the same time\. When you have a full\-time job and a bunch of other hobbies and a family, this ability to multitask and still produce something worth using is nice\. Having said that, what I’m having it write is toy code\. It’s handy, but it’s light\-years away from the code that I deal with at work, where uptime is golden, and the stakes are much higher\. At work I use AI mainly as a research assistant, and still write my code myself where I know exactly what the code is doing\. I can’t imagine an AI that I would trust to write the code I need to write for work\. Anyway, if you want a simple, hackable terminal emulator where you can probably have claude add any feature you want, give it a try\.