8-Month Project Update
I started the Tug project eight months ago today, with the goal of creating an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for AI coding. I’ve made much progress, and I’m beginning to pull together the loose ends that remain in preparation for more complete descriptions and announcements.
Before I do that, today feels like a good time to take stock. I know that the topic of AI as an aid in creative and technical work remains controversial, but for myself, I am convinced. The scope and pace of work I have been able to achieve since this past February is too obvious to deny. I offer two means to express this.
The first is that I started with only a Claude Code account, and I now have a complex, fully-functioning app that I use all day every day for software development and other projects too. I’m typing this message in Tug right now. About four months ago, I cut over to developing Tug with Tug (I did the preceding bootstrapping period with Claude Code in the terminal). From that day, I never looked back. This gives me the confidence that Tug is becoming suitable for serious projects. The advent of AI has given me the license to dream bigger dreams, and then set about realizing them, and if nothing else, that is worthwhile. I started with nothing, and now, I am a very happy user of the app I’ve created.
The second is the numbers, admittedly a tricky way to assess a software project, but the sheer scale of the output seems noteworthy. In Tug, over eight months, I’ve done just over 7k commits in more than 3.9k files and have produced almost 875k lines of code in a half-dozen languages. These numbers don’t tell anything about quality, of course, but they do speak to the pace of my work, which is incredible to me. In 2020, I did a six-month project I did to create Up Spell, an iOS word game. I wrote that project in the old-fashioned style where I typed each line of code all by myself, one at a time. The results were: ~850 commits, 235 files, and 31k lines of code.
| Up Spell | Tug | Tug ÷ Up Spell | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commits/day | ~4.8 | ~29 | ~6× |
| Files/day (net) | ~1.3 | ~16 | ~12× |
| Code lines/day (net) | ~175 | ~3,600 | ~20× |
| Code lines per commit | ~36 | ~125 | ~3.5× |
| Total code lines | 31.6k | 875k | ~28× |
This adds up to: ~6× more commits, ~20× more net code lines/day, and ~28× more total lines of code. In Tug, I have been working far faster than I did during Up Spell, and I have produced all this code as the only human on the project. In the times before AI, I doubt I would have even attempted a project of the size and complexity of Tug. It feels as if it would have taken me many years to do the work I have done in the past few months.
I am convinced in this new approach to AI-assisted software development, and for me, the only way is forward. I do not miss the old ways at all.
All this code is open source. Feel free to have a look for yourself.