Why We Built Craaft: The Story Behind the Product
Every developer tool has an origin story. Here's ours — from frustration with existing solutions to building something we actually want to use every day.
Kevin M.
Founder
The Frustration That Started It All
It was 2024, and AI coding assistants were everywhere. Cursor was gaining traction. Copilot was in every VS Code installation. Windsurf was the new kid on the block. And yet, something felt off.
Every tool wanted me to change my environment. Switch to this IDE. Install that extension. Learn a new interface. And all of them sent my code to the cloud.
I just wanted to use Claude Code with a better UI. That's it.
The Realization
After months of using Claude Code in the terminal, I realized the core experience was incredible. The AI understood context. It could refactor entire codebases. It wrote tests that actually made sense.
But the terminal interface was... limiting. No syntax highlighting in responses. No easy way to see file changes. No history management. No prompt queue.
That's when the idea hit: What if we built a beautiful interface for Claude Code, without touching the underlying magic?
The Philosophy
We made three core decisions early on:
1. Your IDE, Your Rules
We're not going to tell you to abandon VS Code, Zed, Neovim, or whatever you use. You've spent years customizing your environment. Your muscle memory is precious. Craaft works alongside your IDE, not instead of it.
2. 100% Local
Your code never leaves your machine. We're just an interface. The actual AI calls go directly from your Mac to Anthropic's API. We can't see your code even if we wanted to.
3. Provider Agnostic
Today it's Claude. Tomorrow it might be GPT-5. Next year, who knows? We built Craaft to work with any CLI-based AI assistant. Switch providers with a click.
The Technical Challenge
Building a Chrome extension that feels native is hard. Building one that communicates with a local process is harder. Building one that streams AI responses in real-time while managing state across multiple contexts is... an adventure.
The architecture we landed on:
The Bridge is the secret sauce. It handles licence verification, session management, file operations, and the communication between your browser and your local machine.
What's Next
We're just getting started. On the roadmap:
Try It Yourself
We built Craaft because we needed it. If you've ever felt frustrated with AI coding tools that want to take over your entire workflow, give us a try.
14 days free. No credit card required. Your code stays on your machine.