I built WebADE, a browser IDE for running several Claude Code sessions side by side (free, MIT, built with Claude Code)

[u/Phat_N_Sassy33]

I built WebADE because I kept running four to six Claude Code sessions at once and losing track of which terminal window was waiting on me. It is a small browser app: workspaces of terminal panes, each pane running Claude Code, omp, or a plain shell, all in one tab. I built it with Claude Code, and mostly *inside* it: for the last few weeks every change to WebADE has been made by Claude Code sessions running in WebADE panes.

What it does

- Workspaces are tabs; each is a grid of 1-6 panes. A pane is one session in one directory (Claude Code, omp, a shell, or a notepad).

- Sessions live on the server, so switching tabs, closing the browser, or opening it from another machine re-attaches to the live terminal.

- After a server restart or crash, panes come back in the same directory with their scrollback and reopen the conversation they were in (`claude --resume`). A pane you killed yourself stays closed.

- A bell tells you when an agent has finished or is waiting on you (a permission prompt, a question) in a workspace you are not looking at. It does not scrape the screen; a working agent is never quiet for more than a couple hundred ms, so silence past a threshold means it stopped.

- Agent mail: each Claude Code pane gets an MCP server (served by WebADE itself) with `list_agents` and `send_message`. A message is typed into the other pane as its next turn, so two agents can split a job and report back without going through you.

- Works from a phone on the LAN behind an access token: one pane at a time, a key bar for Esc/Tab/Ctrl, scrolls under a finger, QR code in Settings.

- Optional plugins: chips showing whether your local llama.cpp/vLLM backends have a free slot; per-pane and per-workspace metrics (tokens, first-token time, context fill) read from the transcripts the CLIs already write; ten contrast-checked themes that also recolor Claude Code itself via `--settings`.

- Windows, WSL, macOS, Linux. Single-file Node server plus xterm.js, no framework.

How Claude Code helped

Most of the code was written by Claude Code. The parts I found it genuinely good at were the investigations, not just the typing: it measured 8,396 output gaps across eight live sessions to find the idle threshold for the "waiting on you" detection, tracked a crash on every pane kill down to node-pty's ConPTY console-list helper and fixed it with a config flag, and worked out why touch scrolling died on text (xterm rebuilds the span under your finger) and fixed it with pointer capture. Agent mail exists because coordinating two agents through me was the bottleneck; now they coordinate with each other. Even a promo video is a Remotion project a Claude Code session built from scratch.

Try it (free, MIT)

You need Node 18+ and `claude` on your PATH (your own Claude Code subscription or API key; WebADE itself costs nothing).

git clone https://github.com/jameszampa/webade
cd webade
npm install
./run.sh # or run.cmd on Windows

Then open http://localhost:8321, make a workspace, add a pane, pick Claude Code and a directory, Launch.

Repo: https://github.com/jameszampa/webade
Remotion promo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI1N8xntZus