What's this about?
Waku is a free, open-source desktop app that acts as a single native front-end for the AI coding agents you already run in the terminal — Claude Code, Codex, and others. It shows sessions, transcripts, tool activity, and checkpoints in one window. Its most distinctive feature: every prompt automatically snapshots your working files under a hidden git reference, so "undo" rolls back the code *and* the conversation together rather than just clearing the chat. Everything stays on your machine — no account, no telemetry.
What exactly is GPUI?
GPUI is the user-interface framework the Zed team wrote in Rust, which draws the entire application using the graphics card instead of the web technologies most desktop apps use. Most cross-platform apps today are built on Electron, which effectively ships a whole web browser inside the app — reliable but heavy and slow to launch. A GPUI app launches instantly and scrolls smoothly through years of transcript. Waku is a rare third-party app built on it, which is exactly why it caught developers' attention.
Why is this worth noticing?
- It's an early sign of a new software category: as people run several coding agents at once, a neutral cockpit that speaks to all of them — rather than each vendor's own UI — becomes valuable.
- The checkpoint design addresses a real, under-served problem. Rolling back an agent's code changes and its conversation state in one action is something most agent tools handle badly.
- Its local-only, no-telemetry architecture is a deliberate contrast to the cloud-first direction of most agent tooling, and lands the same day as Zed's Delta, which takes the opposite (collaborative, synced) bet.