Cool project, I like the idea of having tmux-compatible CLI. I used Zellij to get better UX, but many agent tools integrate with tmux. This way agent tools can still integrate tmux as a defacto standard for programmatic interface while having better interface for users.
But I wonder if tmux/rmux design is suboptimal since it couples session persistence and window management together. Do you have an opinion the design which separates the responsibilities? An example that pioneered this approach is abduco, and libghostty-based zmx being a modern implementation.
Reviewing large volume of code is a problem. In the pre-LLM era, as a workaround to occasionally review large PRs, I used to checkout the PR, reset commits, and stage code as I would review. In the first pass I would stage the trivial changes, leaving the "meat" of the PR that would need deeper thinking for later passes.
With the increased volume of code with agentic coding, what was once occasional is now a daily occurrence. I would like to see new kinds of code review to deal with larger volume of code. The current Github review interface does not scale well. And I am not sure Microsoft has organizational capacity to come up creative UI/UX solutions to this problem.
Exactly this, existing code review tools became insufficient with the increase of volume of code, I would like to see more innovation here.
One idea that comes to mind to make review easier would be to re-create commits following Kent Beck's SB Changes concept - splitting structure changes (tidying/refactoring) and behavior changes (features). The structure changes could then be quickly skimmed (especially with good coverage) and it should save focus for review of the behavior changes.
The challenge is that it is not the same as just committing the hunks in different order. But maybe a skill with basic agent loop could work with capabilities of models nowadays.
Good to know, that makes it even better. I still find Opus 4.5 to be the best model currently. But if next generation of GPT/Gemini close the gap that will cross the inflection point for me and make 3rd party harnesses viable. Or if they jump ahead, that should put more pressure on the Flicker Company to fix the flicker or relax the subscriptions.
The OpenClaw/pi-agent situation seems similar to ollama/llama-cpp, where the former gets all the hype, while the latter is actually the more impressive part.
This is great work, I am looking forward how it evolves in the future. So far Claude Code seems best despite its bugs given the generous subscription, but when the market corrects and the prices will get closer to API prices, then probably the pay-per-token premium with optimized experience will be a better deal than to suffer Claude Code glitches and paper cuts.
The realization is that at the end agent framework kit that is customizable and can be recursively improved by agents is going to be better than a rigid proprietary client app.
This is awesome! I was thinking it would be neat to have something like abduco but on a more reliable foundation, like libghostty-vt.
For my agent management scripts I use zellij since it is more ergonomic than tmux. Abduco sounded good in principle, but implementation is too limited. However, zellij is quite huge in the order of tens of thousands LOC and I am using only small part of it. It looks like zmx might implement just the right amount of features for this use case, I am going to try it. It is always nice to achieve same functionality with leaner tools.
Do you also think about dvtm part alternative? I wonder if once libghostty proper gets finished it would open possibility to level up textual multiplexing and unlock some cool features with graphical UIs.
Great thought provoking article! Indeed, typing commands on the command line feels primitive like typing code into interactive interpreters (python, irb, etc.). Those are primitive REPLs.
With lisp REPLs one types in the IDE/editor having full highlighting, completions and code intelligence. Then code is sent to REPL process for evaluation. For example Clojure has great REPL tooling.
A variation of REPL is the REBL (Read-Eval-Browse Loop) concept, where instead of the output being simply printed as text, it is treated as values that can be visualized and browsed using graphical viewers.
Existing editors can already cover the runbooks use case pretty well. Those can be just markdown files with key bindings to send code blocks to shell process for evaluation. It works great with instructions in markdown READMEs.
The main missing feature editor-centric command like workflow I can imagine is the history search. It could be interesting to see if it would be enough to add shell history as a completion source. Or perhaps have shell LSP server to provide history and other completions that could work across editors?
Also in the context of LLMs I think model weights themselves could be considered an untrusted input, because who knows what was in the training dataset. Even an innocent looking prompt could potentially trigger a harmful outcome.
In that regard it reminds me of the CAP theorem, which also has three parts. However, in practice partitioning in distributed systems is given, so the choice is just between availability or consistency.
So in the case of lethal trifecta it is either private data or external communication, but the leg between these two will always have some risk.
The strength of Lisps is in ability to define DSLs and then concisely express solutions for problems in that domain. Arguably no other programming language was able to exceed or even match that power until now.
The math behind transformers is deterministic, so LLMs could be treated as compilers (putting aside intentionally adding temperature and non-determinism due to current internal GPU scheduling). In the future I imagine we could be able to declare a dependency on a model, hash its weights in a lockfile and the prompt/spec itself will be the code, which corresponds to that insight.
> It seems to me that LISP will probably be superseded for many purposes by a language that does to LISP what LISP does to machine language. Namely it will be a higher level language than LISP that, like LISP and machine language, can refer to its own programs. (However, a higher level language than LISP might have such a large declarative component that its texts may not correspond to programs. If what replaces the interpreter is smart enough, then the text written by a user will be more like a declarative description of the facts about a goal and the means available for attaining it than a program per se).
Pretty accurate foresight in 1980, in the "Mysteries and other Matters" section McCarthy predicting declarative textual description replacing lisp as a higher-level programming language, basically describing todays LLMs and agentic coding.
Although niche, things are pretty lively in the community. Among other things this year great progress was made on Jank, the native LLVM-based implementation with seamless low-level C++ interop. As part of that work a test suite is being created [0] and now includes runners for all of the major implementations to compare compatibility, next best thing besides a formal specification.
Great work! I was just thinking the other day how an interface like this would be useful, it seems strange we don't see more UI attempts beyond basic linear chat.
I find most need for managing context for problem solving. I describe a problem, LLM gives me 5 possible solutions. From those I immediately see 2 of them won't be viable, so I can prune the search. Then it is best to explore the others separately without polluting the context with non-viable solutions.
I saw this problem solving approach described as Tree-based problem management [0]. Often when solving problems there can be some nested problem which can prove to be a blocker and cut off whole branch, so it is effective to explore these first.
Another cool attempt was thorny.io [1] (I didn't get to try it, and it is now unfortunately defunct) in which you could mark nodes with metadata like pro/con. Higher nodes would aggregate these which could guide you and give you prioritization which branch to explore next.
Also graph rendering looks cooler, but outliners seem to be more space efficient. I use Logseq, where I apply this tree-based problem solving, but have to copy the context and response back-and-forth manually. Having an outliner view as an alternative for power users would be neat.
Very cool! I created something similar for Casio F-91W. It also uses XState. The benefit of specifying a machine in XState, is that one can embed Stately editor to visualize the states and their transitions.