Announcing Ruckus

I'm happy to announce the public release of Ruckus, a Racket IDE for iPhone and iPad. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Ruckus is open source and based on Noise. The frontend was coded almost entirely by Claude Code, with a lot of architecture guidance and code review from me. The project was on the back of my mind for a while, but I probably would never have started it were it not for CC becoming quite good at (what I find to be) mundane tasks like this.

My workflow was1 pretty simple. I would come up with a task and tell CC to expand on it and write a plan to disk. Then I would ask it to perform the task. It would summarize what it was about to do and I'd correct it or tell it to go ahead. After it finished a first pass at a task, I'd review the changes and concurrently ask it to review them itself, either by running the /simplify command or by telling it to "Ultrathink2 and review the pending changes for issues and refactoring opportunities." While I don't have a counterexample to compare with, my instinct is that this took overall less time than it would've had I done everything manually -- which is not something I would've felt even a few months ago with the state of the art at the time.

I realize this is sounding like an ad for Anthropic, but I'm actually ambivalent about these tools. On one hand, I love the act of programming and I feel similarly to Greg Knauss. On the other hand, they are becoming genuinely useful, so I guess I'll continue to use them for work I don't feel like doing for now.

  1. It has since evolved to something more complicated that I'll write about someday. But the version released today was built almost entirely following this workflow.

  2. ultrathink is a keyword that temporarily turns on maximum thinking effort. It only works interactively, so I would keep repeating more or less the same phrasing after each task. At one point, I even considered adding a keyboard macro for it.