Parachord is a new all-in-one music-streaming app that pulls all your content into one interface, so you don’t have to jump between platforms to listen to your favorite songs.
As PCMag reports, the app is the brainchild of J Herskowitz, creator of Tomahawk, a similar service that shut down in 2016. However, this time around, his development process got some AI help from Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Unifying the Music Experience
The genesis of Tomahawk, and now Parachord, was about unifying the music experience. “I have very specific desires around enabling and fostering music data portability,” Herskowitz explains on LinkedIn. “I’m sharing [Parachord] in the event others may share some of my pet peeves and desire to enable social media experiences that don’t require us to convince everyone to use the same music services we do.”
Herskowitz spent around six years working on Tomahawk with a part-time team of six people, but Parachord has been a solo endeavor. Despite being a decade removed from Tomahawk, Herskowitz was still feeling the pain of social music sharing. He saw someone doing something similar and got the itch to try his own thing again—just to see what happened.
Claude Did the Coding Work
With Claude doing the coding work, it went from idea to a working project in less than a month. First, Herskowitz told Claude to look at an old Tomahawk repository on GitHub and understand the core concepts. Things like how the revolving pipeline, the logic, and the plugin architecture all worked. He gave it old blog posts to read and understand for more context. Then he asked the AI for suggestions on how to construct a new version.
Claude recommended Electron, React, Tailwind, and CSS as the technical architecture. It looked at old plugins and reworked those to use new APIs and methods. Herskowitz even had some old designs for his past music app that were never used, so he gave them to Claude to give Parachord some more style than the AI would have been able to come up with on its own. While a lot of previous plugins for Tomahawk were dead services, new plugins were able to be created for AI-generated playlists and more.
Claude Also Fixed the Bugs
Herskowitz used Claude for all the coding work, but he’s also used it for fixing bugs. He doesn’t really dive into fixing problems manually; he’ll either ask Claude to fix something, describing the issue, or open the debugger and copy and paste specific parts that he wants the AI to inspect.
Claude can sometimes go off the rails; at times, it worked itself into a mess and couldn’t extract itself from the problem, just going in circles. As a result, Parachord looks polished, but Herskowitz will be the first to tell you that it’s still rough around the edges.
Early adopters or the technically minded can kick the tires on the app under its MIT open-source license right now. There are builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux on GitHub.
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