Leaving the terminal for BB

TL;DR

BB is good. If you run your agents in tmux or herdr and you like customising how you work, give it a go. It runs Claude, Codex and other agents side by side on the subscriptions you already have, and you can prompt the rest into existence as plugins that hot-reload while you’re using it.

If you run Claude Code in a terminal inside VS Code, that’s fair enough. The terminal has been the default for ages. But it’s a very different time now. If Claude Code is all you use, install the Claude desktop app. If you use a few agents, try T3 Code, or BB if you want to customise stuff. I’d encourage you to experiment, and hopefully your boss gives you some time to do it.

Why I left tmux and the terminal

For most of this year my agents lived in tmux. Claude and Codex ran side by side, and coloured dots told me which agent was working or blocked. I gave a tmux tips and tricks talk at a Claude community meetup in London in March. Then I put the whole setup on my phone with remobi and talked about it at AI Engineer Europe in London in April 2026 (“Don’t change your terminal workflow for mobile”).

I gave up on mobile in the end, because I was constantly steering agents while out with family. These days agents don’t need constant supervision, so I don’t mind a bit of mobile agent time in BB. It doesn’t eat my life like it used to.

I’d got so used to my way of working that I couldn’t see what I was missing. Playing with T3 Code showed me a different way. I liked it, but customising it meant rebuilding it, and the builds were slow. I nearly moved to herdr, which is a better version of my patched-together BTECUK slang. A BTEC version of something is the cheap knock-off. Sorry to anyone who did a BTEC, it's only a bit of banter tmux setup. It fixes a lot of the half-baked stuff I’d hacked into tmux, but it’s still limited by the terminal as a platform. So I thought, fuck it, let’s try BB.

Why not just use the official desktop apps?

I tried the official desktop apps, but back then you couldn’t customise them. They’re good, and when they do something new I might use one for a bit. But I don’t want to switch apps to switch models. I want the same keypresses and the same shortcuts whether I’m talking to Claude or Codex. So I steal the good ideas and bring them into my own setup.

Workflows and subthreads

BB has a built-in workflows plugin. A workflow is a script that fans work out to agents and runs checks on what comes back, and each step can pick its own provider and model. So I get Claude-style dynamic workflows with Codex and Claude, on my existing subscriptions. Absolutely fabulous.

Threads and subthreads are a cool feature of BB. The harnesses’ own subagents still work, and BB shows them in the thread. But BB can also spawn a subagent as a whole thread with a parent. I’ll say “split this off into its own thread” or “go review it with Codex”, and the agent spawns a child thread that sits under it in the sidebar. The child is a normal thread, so it can run a different model in its own worktree, and I can open it, reply to it or fork it after the parent’s moved on.

My plugins

Every time BB annoyed me, I’d prompt a fix into existence as a plugin. It hot-reloads while I’m using it, in the spirit of Pi. OpenCode v2 does it too, but I’m scared to use my Claude subscription through it. It’s not the native harness, and I don’t want to get hit by the ban hammer. Claude Code has mods now, which it didn’t before, but they only work for Claude. I want things to work with everything.

Git viewer and agent switcher

The two I use most are my git viewer and the agent switcher. The git viewer is a chip on each thread with the branch, ahead and behind counts and changed files. Press Alt+G and you get pull, push, stashes, a commit graph and a diff for every file, all from the keyboard, with lazygit’s key bindings because I’m used to them. The agent switcher picks the model, effort and Claude account for a thread, and shows how much quota each account has left. Want a little Kanban board? Add one.

Hands-free with a foot pedal

I hooked Hex by Kit Langton at Anomaly, the OpenCode lot, up to BB for dictation and voice commands, plus a little foot pedal. The left pedal records a commandI don't strictly need it. I can just say commands out loud, but if the voice model is misbehaving I hold the pedal to force a command while I hold it, the middle one dictates into the prompt box and the right one presses Enter. I can navigate threads, archive them and prompt, all by voice, even whilst holding something heavy with two hands, like a small baby.

Agents that reply with sliders and charts

Images mostly work in a terminal, with things like the Kitty graphics protocol, and critique-style diffs are great. What you can’t easily have is a web page, or a visual response you can interact with, and some tables and diagrams, like mermaid, don’t always render properly. Mitchell Hashimoto and his gang of bandits at Superlogical might change that.

I liked ChatGPT’s new generative UI, so I vibe-coded my own as a BB plugin. My agents can reply with sliders and charts built from native components.

1root = Stack([pipeline, Grid([inputs, results], 2)])2pipeline = Row([Box([IconLabel("cloud", "Uploads")], "muted", true, "small"), Icon("arrow-right", "small"), Box([IconLabel("layers", "Queue")], "muted", true, "small"), Icon("arrow-right", "small"), Box([IconLabel("settings", "Workers")], "muted", true, "small"), Icon("arrow-right", "small"), Box([IconLabel("database", "Storage")], "muted", true, "small")], 1)3inputs = Stack([Slider("Jobs per minute", $jobs, 10, 300, 10, "jobs"), Slider("Seconds per job", $secs, 1, 60, 1, "s"), Slider("Workers running", $workers, 1, 80, 1, "workers"), Select("Target utilisation", $target, ["70%", "80%", "90%"])])4results = Stack([Row([Metric("Workers needed", @Ceil($jobs * $secs * 100 / (60 * target)), "workers"), Metric("Utilisation", @Ceil($jobs * $secs * 100 / (60 * $workers)), "%")], 3), backlog])5target = $target == "70%" ? 70 : $target == "80%" ? 80 : 906capacity = $workers * 60 / $secs7growth = $jobs > capacity ? $jobs - capacity : 08backlog = BarChart(["1m", "2m", "3m", "4m", "5m", "6m", "7m", "8m", "9m", "10m"], [growth, growth * 2, growth * 3, growth * 4, growth * 5, growth * 6, growth * 7, growth * 8, growth * 9, growth * 10], "Backlog, jobs")9$jobs = 12010$secs = 2011$workers = 3212$target = "80%"

What I can’t do

tmux had constraints too. I patched tmux’s C source to get the window list at the top and my sessions along the bottom. BB has a few things I can’t customise, but I’ve found workarounds that are good enough.

Multi-machine is one I don’t love. BB connects machines hub-and-spoke, so my server would need a connection into my main computer, and I want the server isolated. I could be wrong, that’s what my friend Claude told me. I could fork BB if I had to, but so far plugins have done everything.

Should you switch?

Maybe all this tinkering is a bit of a distraction. I enjoy it though, and I thinkhope it makes me productive. It could be AI psychosis.

If you like customising how you work, try BB. If you don’t, use T3 Code or another agent app, like Claude, Codex or Amp.

My plugins are in my dotfiles if you want a nose. Give us a shout if you build something good.