According to Claude, if I want to see my team agents in split panes while they're working, I need to set up tmux. Tmux. This is new territory for me, and honestly, I'm fascinated by it.
There's something about rediscovering the terminal that feels... right. I spent years thinking about web UIs, CSS layouts, responsive design, all of that. And then you start working with agents and suddenly you realize: maybe the most powerful interface is just text, split into panes, running in the terminal.
The irony isn't lost on me. A web developer, leaning into TUI—terminal user interfaces. But it makes sense. When you're working with multiple agents executing tasks in parallel, you don't need a dashboard with charts and buttons. You need visibility. Split panes showing what each agent is doing. Real-time feedback. Raw output.
It's lean. It's efficient. It's the opposite of everything we've been trained to build for the past decade.
I'm still figuring out tmux. There's a learning curve, sure. But there's also this weird elegance to it that I'm starting to appreciate. The fact that it's scriptable, composable, that you can set up your environment once and never think about it again. That's a kind of power you don't get with graphical interfaces.
And it raises this bigger question: are we actually going back to terminals? Is the web app era ending?
Probably not. But I do think there's a real shift happening. When the bottleneck becomes cognitive load—when you're trying to coordinate between multiple AI agents working on a complex problem—suddenly the richness of a GUI doesn't matter. What matters is clarity. Signal. Minimal noise.
The terminal gives you that. A tmux session split into panes, each one showing an agent grinding through work. That's not a step backward. That's a step sideways into something completely different.
I'm excited to get deeper into this. There's a whole ecosystem of TUI tools I haven't explored yet, and the fact that they're becoming relevant again—not because they're "retro" but because they're actually the right tool—that's genuinely cool.
Part of the #100DaysToOffload documenting agentic development in 2026