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One terminal or six.
aider is one of the best open-source pair programmers ever put in a terminal, and it earned that reputation. Loom asks a different question: what if six official Claude Code CLIs worked your backlog at once, with a Conductor keeping score?
Shared roots
Both respect the terminal.
aider proved a CLI can be a serious coding partner. Loom keeps that respect: the fleet is six real Claude Code TUIs inside a WebGL terminal with native PTYs, tabs, splits, and search. The setup stays terminal-simple too, and the fleet needs no API key.
# install the official Claude Code CLI
$ curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
# sign in once, the whole fleet reuses this login
$ claude loginThe difference
A partner versus a fleet.
What aider does best
One focused session with you in the loop: tight git habits, broad model support, scriptable, and famously lightweight. For a single well-scoped change, it is hard to beat, and it costs nothing to try.
What Loom adds
Parallelism plus conduction. A Conductor plans your goal into a mission DAG, dispatches tasks across six sessions, answers permission prompts with only the safe affirmative, recovers stalls and rate limits, rotates pooled Claude accounts, and verifies work before it counts as done.
What surrounds the fleet
A full workspace: CodeMirror 6 editor with hunk-by-hunk AI diffs, source control with the complete git graph, auto-detected web preview, file explorer, and themes. A GUI around real CLIs, not a replacement for them.
Questions
Common questions.
Can I run aider inside Loom?
Yes. Loom's terminal opens native PTYs with tabs and splits, so any tab can run whatever you like, aider included, right next to the fleet.
Is Loom open source like aider?
Yes. The whole app is Apache-2.0 and public on GitHub. Read more on the open source page.
Does Loom wrap or fork the Claude CLI?
Neither. Each fleet slot runs the unmodified official Claude Code CLI on your existing Claude login, so there is no API key to manage for the fleet. See the Claude login.
Hand it the work.
Walk away.
macOS, Linux, and Windows. Around 13 MB. Free and open source.