I was tired of IDEs shipping with AI bloatware and telemetry. 1 GB for a "lightweight" IDE is fairly laughable. And all of that would be fine if I used any of it. I didn't. What I actually used came down to three things: a file browser, a console for my code assist, and a console for CLI commands. (I admit a debugger occasionally but less so these days.)
So I went looking at what the terminal could do in 2026 and landed on Zellij and Yazi, made a dev console alias, and was off. Faster, lighter, less distracting. Then I rebuilt it on my laptop, then on my work machine, each slightly different. Which had me wondering: can I make this truly portable?
That's bothy. One command opens the workspace. If you already have the tools it just sets up config and an alias. If you don't, it pulls official releases, verifies them, and keeps everything in one directory it can fully uninstall. No root, no PATH changes, and your credentials are your business.
And yes, I had Claude write most of it, on purpose. This was about as low stakes as a project gets, so it became my testbed for an AI-led workflow where I made the decisions and set the rules, and had Claude plan and execute inside them. The docs cover how that went, including the parts where the answer was "don't build that." The most interesting thing here might be the claude.md since it is the end state of this experiment such as it is.
It's admittedly over-engineered, and anyone who wants this has probably already built their own dotfiles. (The cool thing is, if you did, bothy can be pointed at yours instead of its own.)
Anyway, I like it, and if a few other people do too, then I'm happy.
I was tired of IDEs shipping with AI bloatware and telemetry. 1 GB for a "lightweight" IDE is fairly laughable. And all of that would be fine if I used any of it. I didn't. What I actually used came down to three things: a file browser, a console for my code assist, and a console for CLI commands. (I admit a debugger occasionally but less so these days.)
So I went looking at what the terminal could do in 2026 and landed on Zellij and Yazi, made a dev console alias, and was off. Faster, lighter, less distracting. Then I rebuilt it on my laptop, then on my work machine, each slightly different. Which had me wondering: can I make this truly portable?
That's bothy. One command opens the workspace. If you already have the tools it just sets up config and an alias. If you don't, it pulls official releases, verifies them, and keeps everything in one directory it can fully uninstall. No root, no PATH changes, and your credentials are your business.
And yes, I had Claude write most of it, on purpose. This was about as low stakes as a project gets, so it became my testbed for an AI-led workflow where I made the decisions and set the rules, and had Claude plan and execute inside them. The docs cover how that went, including the parts where the answer was "don't build that." The most interesting thing here might be the claude.md since it is the end state of this experiment such as it is.
It's admittedly over-engineered, and anyone who wants this has probably already built their own dotfiles. (The cool thing is, if you did, bothy can be pointed at yours instead of its own.)
Anyway, I like it, and if a few other people do too, then I'm happy.