Why I built Lian Wu

Originally published on Lian Wu’s blog.

I try different AIs all the time: OpenAI’s GPT models, Gemini, Grok, Claude, and many more through OpenRouter.

But every time I switch, my conversation stays behind in the old app. The new AI knows nothing about what I was doing, so I stop, start over somewhere else, and lose my flow.

I tried tools like OpenCode, which connect to many providers. None of them felt like the agent I wanted.

So I built my own: a desktop agent app for the Mac that works the way I like. In Lian Wu, I can switch to another AI in the middle of a conversation, and the whole conversation comes with it.

Lian Wu also has Guilds for bigger jobs. A Guild puts several skills together in ordered steps to finish one task, a bit like plugins in Codex or Claude Code. Code Review, for example, gives a pull request to a team of AI reviewers who vote on every finding.

Why the name? Lian Wu is a fruit from where I grew up. In English it’s called the wax apple. It’s crisp, juicy and delicious, so I named the app after it.

That’s the story. Here’s the app itself: in this 75-second demo, Claude sorts forty comments into groups. Then I switch the same conversation to GPT, and GPT checks Claude’s work.