Intro to Tug, an IDE for AI Coding

November 11, 2026 at 2:34 PM

For the past nine months, I’ve been making Tug, an app to create a great user experience for AI coding. I made this video to tell you more about it.

Yes, it seems a bit funny to be “releasing” an app that has been open source since I started working on it, so maybe I’ll just consider this post to be about releasing the video describing it. I’ve had a great time developing the app. The time has flown by! 🚀

A fun wrinkle is that I now develop Tug with Tug. I started with Claude Code in the terminal, but once I got Tug up and running well enough to use, about five months ago, there’s been no gap between using the app and working on it. I’ve loved this aspect of the project, and it reminds me of something I wrote about in my book, Creative Selection.

There’s a common high-tech term for a daily regimen of using and evaluating your own product while you’re trying to develop it: dogfooding. I never liked this term myself, and it didn’t appeal to Apple sensibilities either. Pet food isn’t typically thought of as a pinnacle of product development. On the [hallway where we developed the software for the original iPhone], we were trying to make excellent products for people, and while we sometimes said “dogfooding” inside Apple, more often, and more officially, we began to say “living on” to describe the day-to-day routine of living on our in-progress software like it was a real product.