Forge is a tiling window manager extension for GNOME that has been looking for a new maintainer for several years. To fulfill my own tiling needs and experiment with Claude, I forked the project and now use the resulting extension every day.
The project started from the upstream backlog of 140 open issues. I worked through most of it with Claude across a series of plan-implement cycles, and then kept going well past it: over five weeks in mid-2026 alone I closed 209 more issues, 140+ of them bugs that Claude found via auditing the codebase. Along the way the extension picked up a unit test suite, end-to-end tests that run in GitHub CI/CD against a containerized GNOME shell, and a fuzzer.
Highlights
- Bug fixes at scale: most of the original 140-issue backlog (39 complex and 18 out-of-scope issues remain), plus 48 more re-triaged from the upstream board and fixed against the fork.
- Test coverage from near zero: unit tests, then an E2E harness that drives a real GNOME shell in CI so regressions surface without manual testing.
- New features: quality-of-life improvements and a keybinding cheatsheet overlay and setting synchronization.
- Bug provenance analysis: a breakdown of which fixed bugs were inherited from the existing code versus introduced during this effort.
Status
Tagged as a beta release and stable enough for daily use. These changes are not upstreamed. The diff against upstream is substantial and sits on a single branch, which makes it hard for anyone to review; backporting individual fixes is possible but has not happened yet. Getting this work back to the community is the open problem that I hope to resolve in the next few months.
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