Long story short: I'm a network plumber who has written a lot of Perl code in his life. This (rio) is just my experiment in developing more complex software with the help of a typical "AI toolchain". Somewhat anachronistically, I chose to develop an IDE in Tcl/Tk.
Like most people, I started interacting with LLMs through chat interfaces and soon gave them simple coding tasks — which led to the typical "you code something, I copy-paste and test it" workflow. Which becomes tedious rapidly.
I wanted to get to grips with all those new tools and workflows and therefore started to work on rio. If nothing else, I hope this is an interesting gimmick for the Tcl/Tk community — just a piece of usable software in this rather niche ecosystem.
Personally, I most frequently use rio on Windows as my personal Notepad++ replacement at work. Which is working well so far. After this initial release, I'll try rio for LLM-assisted coding, especially with local LLMs.
I'm planning to publish some development workflow folklore later. The website needs RSS, rio needs porting work for the open BSDs. There are lots of things to do.
Come back once in a while if you want to stay tuned.
BR, JK