All of the exciting AI coding is happening in terminals. Codex is good, the various VSCode forks are good, but if you’re doing multi-agent orchestration you’re generally using terminal UIs, roped together with Gastown, agent-deck, OpenClaw, lemonaid, or something else.

It’s gratifying, as someone who never left the terminal for a “grown up” IDE, to see how small programs piped together is the paradigm for innovation here. The stuff that makes it possible? Simple, largely open-source tech:

  • tmux: lemonaid, agent-deck, and Gastown all use tmux panes and windows to let you jump to the right place and give the right info to the right agent at the right time.
  • git: Lots of work-tracking and communication systems (like beads) use git. Git worktrees are an essential component for multiple agents to work on the same codebase at the same time.
  • sqlite: agent-deck uses this for communication, and so many other tools seem to as well.