August 22, 2026 · Joy
Disposable terminals are a bad runtime for AI coding agents
A terminal is a great window. It is a bad runtime for a fleet of AI coding agents.
Windows close. Tabs crash. SSH drops. IDEs restart. Scrollback truncates. None of that is surprising — until the agent’s only memory of the work lived in that window.
Then a crash is not “reconnect.” It is start over.
What the machine actually pays for
When every agent owns a disposable terminal:
- Context gets duplicated into the next prompt
- Terminals pile up until RAM and swap tell the story
- A die forces a full re-run — and a second token bill
- You cannot replay what you missed because it was never a record
This is why Activity Monitor looks like a battlefield during multi-agent days. The Mac is not “bad at AI.” It is hosting N fragile runtimes.
Execution belongs underneath
JoyMux treats execution as a session, not a tab.
Detach should not kill the work. Attach reconnects a client to an owned session. Close is a decision — not an accidental Cmd-W.
That is boring infrastructure language on purpose. The observable outcomes are not: resume after crash, replay missed output, send deltas instead of whole history, recover without rerun.
Keep the same machine. Raise the workload. Stay calmer as a side effect.