One developer spent 6 months building 'Neox', a transparent AI coding desktop
A built and shared Neox, an tool created over six months of nights and weekends. The motivation was a specific frustration with existing tools like Cursor and Claude Code: when an AI agent edits many files at once, it is hard to follow what is happening or feel in control.
Neox addresses this with three s — showing what the agent is doing in real time, making it clear which files are being changed, and presenting diffs in a way that is easy to review. The creator is not positioning it as a competitor to established tools but as a personal experiment in developer-controlled .
Key points
- Neox shows which files an AI agent is editing in real time, so nothing happens invisibly
- The tool is designed for developers who want to review AI changes before they take effect
- Positioned as a transparency-first experiment, not a direct replacement for Cursor or Claude Code
- Built by one person over six months, mostly outside of work hours