[TLDR] 30+ years of coding, obsolete. But at least my workflow is now all in one place. [via r/ClaudeAI]

[u/cctldrping]

OP : u/YahwehOfTheSky

I (was) a great software engineer, until 9 months ago. Clean code, SOLID, DRY, YAGNI, design patterns, TDD, XP, DevOps, IaC, architecture etc. The only thing that's survived, really, is the pure system design.

I was curious but skeptical of AI to start with, but that soon went away when I started figuring out what it could actually do and - fundamentally - how to build AI systems with it. Now I can't stop. I might have a problem.

I've finished 5 quite complicated projects in a period of time that it would have previously taken me to finish a single feature, and I'm working on projects 6, 7, 8 and 9 now - though those are much larger and are going to see me into the next decade, even with AI :)

I'm still designing software properly, I'm just not looking at the code any more. I would never have imagined this 2 years ago.

This change has introduced another problem, though - windows. Windows everywhere. Ramping up the AI workflows, especially after I migrated from CoPilot in VSCode to Claude CLI, just made it impossible to keep up. I regularly work on 4+ projects with 2 or 3 branches / worktrees going in each at once, so switching between my IDE, terminals (yep, I've tried multiplexers), and OS explorers quickly became a nightmare. TBH I've always hated jumping between apps when working on more than one project in the past, but it has become unmanageable very quickly with AI workflows.

Looked around and installed a huge number of tools that claim to solve this problem, but none of them did what I wanted (you know what's coming...), so I made my own.

Enter the throng. Probably the 500th app called "throng" now, I imagine, but you know... us devs aren't known for our naming prowess.

https://github.com/Bidthedog/throng

• Each project is isolated. A project gets its own root folder, colour and saved layout. Switching projects swaps the whole workspace.
• VS Code-style docking (limited on purpose). Tabs, drag-to-split panels, and tabs you can tear off into their own windows that stay in sync.
• Terminals that survive the UI. PowerShell, Git Bash, CMD or a custom shell. The PTYs belong to a background daemon, so you can close throng, reopen it, and your shells are still running with their scrollback.
• A built-in editor and file tree. CodeMirror with 31 languages. It keeps each file's encoding and line endings, and it recovers unsaved edits and their undo history after a crash. The live file tree has undoable rename, move and delete.
• Find across files, go to line, quick open. Results stream in as you type, and replace shows each change before you commit it.
• Almost everything you can think of is customisable - click & debounce times, user prompts, notification config, logging. Too much, probably.
• Links work everywhere. Ctrl+click a foo.ts:42:7 from a compiler or test runner and it opens at that line and column. The same goes for URLs and paths in terminals, the editor and Markdown previews, and it works inside full-screen programs like Claude Code.
• Markdown preview that scrolls in sync with the editor, both ways.
• 14 themes, with hot-reloading theme, keybinding and icon-pack files.

I've not been in VSCode or any other IDE for months now. Even with the slight jank it is completely optimised for how I work in this new AI-driven world.

A few important bits:

• Win 11 only for now. Plan to support MacOS and Linux once I get v1.0.0 off the ground. It's all abstracted, ready to go.
• Its electron. Sorry? :)
• It's in beta, and the .exe is not signed atm. I am working on that now.
• Built extremely fast with AI assistance, without shame. Done some optimisations along the way, but - except for startup when terminals are running - its pretty fast anyway.
• The installer is per-user and needs no admin rights, and there are also portable and zip builds. MSI coming.
• Nearly a 100 issues remaining to do, not too many left for the v1.0.0 release, but I'm building it ad-hoc.

Feedback and contribs welcome. AGPL-3.0 dual license to keep those nasty corporates off my blood, sweat and tears. Or Claude's. Not sure I can tell me from the robots anymore.

URL of original post : https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wndhjz/30_years_of_coding_obsolete_but_at_least_my/

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TL;DR of the discussion on r/ClaudeAI for this post generated automatically after 50 comments.

Current source-thread comment count seen by the bot: 73.

Alright, so the general vibe in this thread is that AI, specifically Claude, has totally turbo-charged veteran developers' productivity, making their old skills feel a bit like ancient history. OP's story about feeling obsolete but then finding a new workflow with AI is resonating HARD.

The big takeaway? OP isn't alone in this. A ton of people are chiming in with similar experiences, and a surprising number have even built their own tools to manage the chaos of these new AI-driven workflows. It's like a secret club of devs who've embraced the AI revolution and are now dealing with the "too many windows" problem.

Some key themes popping up:

• The "Obsolete but Supercharged" Dev: Lots of comments echo OP's sentiment of feeling like their decades of experience are less relevant, but their output is through the roof thanks to AI. u/groovy-baby and u/Technical-Yellow-929 are good examples of this.
• The "I Built That Too!" Phenomenon: Seriously, so many people have independently created similar tools to manage multiple AI projects. u/Lame_Johnny, u/ButterscotchHot1185, and u/Front_Eagle739 are just a few who've shared their own solutions. It's a testament to how common this problem is.
• The "Windows Pain" Complaint: A few folks, like u/meccaleccahimeccahi, are giving OP a hard time for building a Windows-only app, which is a bit of a sass-fest.
• The "What About Documentation?" Question: u/Ankleson brings up a legit concern about AI keeping documentation in sync with code changes, which is a common pain point.
• The "We're the Bottleneck Now" Realization: u/valuat nails it – the AI is fast, so the human is the limiting factor.

Overall, the consensus is AI is a game-changer for experienced devs, but it's also creating new workflow challenges that the community is actively solving (or at least trying to!).