mindful making.
June 2025
We started with a deep belief: in the age of AI, the most important thing to preserve is human intent. We've all seen the wave of new tools. Code now appears in seconds. Vibe coding is real. But something is missing. What does it honestly take to make software? What's the simplest path from an idea to a truly working thing?
The bottleneck has moved. It's no longer about how fast we can type, but how clearly we can think. The new tools meant to help us are creating another kind of mental tax. We're drowning in micro-decisions that have to be handled.
What context do agents need? Give them too much, they get confused. Too little, and they guess wrong. What does a simple phrase like "enterprise-ready" actually mean?
AI lacks our shared dictionary, so every assumption must be spelled out. We're forced to translate our intuition into precise, unforgiving instructions. The result, if not built thoughtfully becomes a house of cards. Code that looks right but crumbles under pressure because it was built without a deep understanding of the whole.
After thousands of hours developing with AI agents, we've adopted a pattern in what worked. It's a simple, disciplined flow: Plan first. Break the plan into clear tasks for human and AI. Execute. Then, update a living document that acts as the project's memory. We call it SpecFlow. It's not rigid, and it forces clarity.
We realized this way of working needed its own home. Our extension wasn't enough. So we reimagined a minimalist approach to software composition tooling.
Think first. Code right.
That's the philosophy behind BearClaude. It's a focused, local-first tool for turning thought into software. It's built for the upstream work—the specs, the reasoning, the structure—so that implementation becomes effortless. It's not quite an IDE but a lot more than a doc editor. We believe it's just right. And hope you do too.
It helps you with a simple process:
- Think in Markdown. Write your plans and requirements.
- Execute your specs directly with an agent.
- Save everything locally. No lock-in. Your thoughts are yours.
- Repeat as your understanding evolves.
We're not building one-click magic buttons. We're building tools that help you think, because that's where the real work now lies. It's for people who want to move fast without giving up control or clarity. It starts as a tool for you, the single maker. We hope it grows into a space for collaboration.
This is our bet on the future of software: a future of mindful making. The craft is about so much more than just speed. It's about depth of thought. It's about building tools that help us think better, so we can build better things. Things with intention.
And things that last.
Greg, Jake, and Sean