Parachord is a new all-in-one music-streaming app that pulls all your content into one interface, so you don’t have to jump between platforms to listen to your favorite songs. It comes from J Herskowitz, creator of Tomahawk, a similar service that shut down in 2016, but this time around, his development process got some AI help from Anthropic’s Claude Code.
The genesis of Tomahawk, and now Parachord, was about unifying the music experience. “I have very specific desires around enabling and fostering music data portability,” Herskowitz explains on LinkedIn. “I’m sharing [Parachord] in the event others may share some of my pet peeves and desire to enable social media experiences that don’t require us to convince everyone to use the same music services we do.”
Content resolution with multiple music sources (Credit: J Herskowitz)
Herskowitz spent around six years working on Tomahawk with a part-time team of six people, but Parachord has been a solo endeavor. Despite being a decade removed from Tomahawk, Herskowitz was still feeling the pain of social music sharing. He saw someone doing something similar and got the itch to try his own thing again—just to see what happened.
With Claude doing the coding work, it went from idea to a working project in less than a month. First, Herskowitz told Claude to look at an old Tomahawk repository on GitHub and understand the core concepts. Things like how the revolving pipeline, the logic, and the plugin architecture all worked. He gave it old blog posts to read and understand for more context. Then he asked the AI for suggestions on how to construct a new version.
Parachord plugins (Credit: J Herskowitz)
Claude recommended Electron, React, Tailwind, and CSS as the technical architecture. It looked at old plugins and reworked those to use new APIs and methods. Herskowitz even had some old designs for his past music app that were never used, so he gave them to Claude to give Parachord some more style than the AI would have been able to come up with on its own. While a lot of previous plugins for Tomahawk were dead services, new plugins were able to be created for AI-generated playlists and more.
Herskowitz used Claude for all the coding work, but he’s also used it for fixing bugs. He doesn’t really dive into fixing problems manually; he’ll either ask Claude to fix something, describing the issue, or open the debugger and copy and paste specific parts that he wants the AI to inspect.
Claude can sometimes go off the rails; at times, it worked itself into a mess and couldn’t extract itself from the problem, just going in circles. As a result, Parachord looks polished, but Herskowitz will be the first to tell you that it’s still rough around the edges.
Early adopters or the technically minded can kick the tires on the app under its MIT open-source license right now. There are builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux on GitHub.
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‘The Personal App Movement’
On LinkedIn, Herskowitz argues this is part of the personal app movement, or “software designed to be yours. Not in the sense that you pay a subscription for access, but in the sense that you built it to solve a very specific and personal use case, you actually control how it works, what data it has, and what services it talks to.”
Personal apps aren’t really supposed to turn into the next Silicon Valley unicorn. “The goal isn’t to raise money, make money or achieve a financial ‘exit.’ They are designed to solve your personal pain points or improve/automate your own workflows,” Herskowitz says.
In that sense, it doesn’t matter if there’s a market for Parachord. Anyone with an idea can use an AI app to bring it to life. “I honestly don’t know if anybody else cares about [content resolution] like I do,” Herskowitz tells me. “But I just find there’s still too much friction to listen to things.”
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On Threads, Rick Klau, the founder of Onsemble and former Chief Technology Innovation Officer of California, gushed about being able to use Claude Code to build a hobby app. “Haven’t had this much fun with computers in decades,” he wrote.
It’s not just hobbyists tinkering with a new tool, though. During a recent earnings call, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström said his “most senior engineers…haven’t written a single line of code since December. They actually only generate code and supervise it.”
He’s not quite on board with personal apps for everyone. “There is this fear that software companies are not going to exist anymore, everyone rolls their own products,” Söderström said. “I certainly don’t think that’s going to be true for consumer products. I think what will happen is something more like what happened with the internet. When the internet came along, everyone thought that we would all have our own web pages. What actually happened was there ended up being very few web pages.”
Instead, Söderström suggests that companies will have more time to experiment with software.
People with the right skills and vision can accomplish in weeks what used to take a team years to do. I think that’s why Parachord is so exciting. No project is off-limits for the right person.
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I’ve contributed to PCMag since 2019, covering Apple, electric vehicles, and lots of other consumer electronics. If a gadget plugs into a wall or uses a battery, there’s a good chance I’ve tested it and have some thoughts about its place in our daily lives. I write featured articles, how-to guides, and daily news.
I got my first taste of writing about technology for Fast Company in 2013, mostly how it intersected with the music industry. Since then I’ve written for dozens of publications and explored all other facets of service journalism, from reviews to buying guides. At one point, I took a break from journalism for a few years to work at a technology startup and then an industry Goliath, both valuable experiences in understanding how the business of tech works from top to bottom.
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