Timeline

I published Start the Chain: My Three-Agent Setup Is Now One Command, a follow-up to the main agent post. The main agent, secondary and worker setup is now the agent-chain skill in tmux-agents, started with one command, and the post covers what changed with a week of real use and how projects talk to each other. It also covers what happens after a restart: tmux-main-sequence brings back a chain for every project, and /resume brings back the conversations that matter.

I shipped v1.12.2 of tmux-agents, a patch release with two fixes that bring behaviour in line with the docs. Renaming and auto-naming now keep the agent kind prefix for agents started with tmux-agents start, so renaming a chain's main to main gives claude-tmux-agents-main instead of tmux-agents-main, and Codex profiles consistently use codex-. Top-level agents, like a chain's main, now go idle when they finish a turn with nothing pending instead of showing amber "needs you", which stays for sub agents and members.

I shipped v1.12.1 of tmux-agents, a small fix for tmux-agents start in a named pane: when you run it from that pane's own shell, it now takes over the pane, keeping its name and connections, and --name renames it first. Before, it refused to start from any named pane.

I shipped v1.11.0 of tmux-agents with long-lived members (tmux-spawn --member), which the agent-chain skill now uses for its secondary and worker instead of sub agents. The agent list is calmer: a fixed name column, compact names, time in state and worked time per agent, plus a pinned preview header with full activity and scrolling that pauses follow. The list now requires fzf and gives clear install instructions when it is missing; there is also a new configuration guide and an updated quick start. After updating, reload the tmux config with tmux source-file ~/.tmux.conf so the new hooks can save worked time and mark removed panes closed.

I shipped v1.10.0 of tmux-agents with one shared skill for Claude and Codex, installable with npx skills add TheClooneyCollection/tmux-agents -g, and a new agent-chain skill for “start the chain”: main, secondary and worker side by side. The installer now handles Codex homes more safely, backs up real files and directories with --force, and warns about dangling skill links; re-run ./install.sh from the installed checkout after updating. CI runs on macOS and Ubuntu, covering installation and upgrades as well as the offline tests. Picker rows now stay aligned, and searches match only agent names and projects.

I shipped v1.9.0 of tmux-agents with hidden agent ids behind the readable names: session records, parent links, waiting lists and queued messages now use ids, so reusing a closed agent's name cannot overwrite its saved conversation, a real bug we found while checking renames. Renaming now changes only the label; names remain unique among live agents and are still how we address them, with ids kept out of the agent list rows. Agents can look up ids with tmux-peers --ids or tmux-spawn --list-closed, and use --resume-id to reopen one exact closed agent when names repeat. Existing setups migrate on first use with a backup of the old records, preserving every resumable conversation and parent link, checked on a copy of my 54 real records.

I shipped v1.8.0 of tmux-agents with tmux-rename: an agent's links, saved records, references from other agents and queued messages follow the new name, and it and its connected agents get a notice. Agents can rename themselves and their descendants, while I can rename anyone. Given names now follow the automatic format, so tmux-spawn codex --name spirit-earth creates codex-<project>-spirit-earth, with --exact to keep a name as given. Every user setting is now a live tmux option in tmux.conf (set -g @tmux_agents_<name> ...), listed in one Configuration section, with the old environment variables still taking precedence.

I shipped v1.7.3 of tmux-agents, rewriting AGENTS.md around what the agents learned shipping v1.6 and v1.7. It now covers running tests, treating flaky tests as release blockers, the list-build process budget, working in a shared checkout and recording decisions before implementation. The release routine says to reply as soon as a release is out and never move a published tag, while the DESIGN.md overview now matches current behaviour.

I shipped v1.7.2 of tmux-agents, a documentation update bringing the Chinese README back in sync with the English one. I also added a rule to keep both versions in sync from now on.

I shipped v1.7.1 of tmux-agents so prefix + a shows the popup in about 50ms, instead of waiting 0.5–0.7 seconds before anything appears: fzf starts immediately and loads the rows right after. The bigger delay was in my shell, since tmux runs every popup through default-shell -c: my fish config loaded thefuck and mise even for non-interactive shells, costing 0.26–0.47 seconds each time, and now stops early in 0.01–0.02 seconds. I added performance notes, an “If popups feel slow” check in the README and a tmux-agents-perf skill to help agents find where a delay comes from.

I shipped v1.7.0 of tmux-agents so tmux-ask keeps waiting messages instead of giving up on a busy pane, with “✉ message waiting” pinned in the agent list and shown in the chip after 30 minutes. If the receiver is gone, the sender gets a notice with the saved text's path; messages for reopenable spawned agents are kept for tmux-spawn --resume, while tmux-ask --pending lists queued or undelivered messages and --retry re-sends them, including files from older versions, with at-least-once delivery. The list also opens and switches scope about 45 times faster on my live data (28 panes and 45 session records), from 4.5 seconds to 0.1 seconds, by using one tmux snapshot instead of hundreds of tmux, awk and git calls; a new test fails the build if a rebuild launches more than 20 processes. The worker split the work across three agents of its own, with decisions recorded.

I shipped v1.6.1 of tmux-agents, a skills update telling agents to reply as soon as a request's main work is done, then send follow-ups such as a deploy or a page going live as notices. For requests with several parts, they send a notice as each part lands. It came from my agent chain: secondary held its v1.6.0 reply until the blog entry was live, leaving main and me unaware that the release was already out.

I shipped v1.6.0 of tmux-agents so one tmux-dismiss closes the secondary, worker and the rest of their subtree, deepest first and with each agent reopenable; agents can close any descendant, while --keep-children leaves children running without an owner. An agent waiting for its first task now shows “○ idle”, and an agent that sends its parent a progress notice and waits no longer gets flagged “needs you”, a bug I saw with spirit-earth. Closed agents whose parents were also closed now appear in the right window's list. The worker split the work across three agents of its own, with decisions recorded and 199 checks, including the new tests/dismiss.sh.

I shipped v1.5.0 of tmux-agents after running several projects at once: prefix + a now opens the agent list for the current window, including its agents and their spawned descendants in hidden windows or splits, with ctrl-t to switch to all windows. Agents waiting for permission or marked “needs you” stay pinned at the top across all windows, longest wait first and labelled with their project and the visible window they belong to (their first visible ancestor’s), so the filter never hides something waiting on me. The status-bar chip stays global on purpose. The decisions are recorded, and tests/list-scope.sh covers the list behaviour.

I shipped v1.4.0 of tmux-agents so spawned agents can open in a visible split with tmux-spawn --split <pane> [--right | --below] [--size N%]. It came from the layout I wanted for my agent chain: main on the left half, secondary top right and worker bottom right, all in one window, using --split main --right for secondary and --for secondary --split secondary --below for the worker. Split agents keep the agent list, status chip, messaging, closing and reopening, though reopened agents return in hidden windows. The decisions are recorded, and tests/spawn-split.sh covers the feature with 43 checks.

I shipped v1.3.2 of tmux-agents, a documentation update naming the middle role in my agent chain “secondary” instead of “coordinator”: main → secondary → worker. The guide, both skills and the spawn-for tests now use the name I chose. Agent behaviour is unchanged.

I shipped v1.3.1 of tmux-agents after a spawned agent on the Stone Age project showed “needs you” when it reported progress just after replying to its parent. A report such as “delivered abc123” now leaves a completed agent done, instead of putting it back to work and flagging it at the next turn end. A new regression case in tests/needs-you.sh covers the sequence.

I shipped v1.3.0 of tmux-agents to support the main → coordinator → worker chain: tmux-spawn --for <owner> lets main spawn a worker that belongs to and connects only to the coordinator, which introduces itself and sends the first task. The worker starts without a task, and depth counts from main so it can still spawn agents of its own. I also fixed messages to closed agent names landing in similarly named windows; missing names now fail, and agents are told to use the names tmux-peers shows now. Product decisions live one per file, with new regression tests for ownership and name matching.

I shipped v1.2.1 of tmux-agents after finished spawned agents showed “needs you” when their parent broadcast a rule as a request. Agents now use tmux-ask --notice to pass along information, so a request saying “no reply needed” doesn't put an idle agent back to work. Notices also preserve a Claude agent's waiting state while background work runs, and regression tests cover both false alarms and cases that really need me.

I published Your Sub-Agents Shouldn't Disappear: Meet tmux-agents, the introduction to tmux-agents that my last two posts kept pointing back to. It covers why I wanted visible sub-agent sessions, how I use them on my game and this blog, and how to try the tool. I also wrote down a few of the design choices and the limits I'm still working through.

I published Messy Chat with Your Agents? You Just Need One More. Really., about splitting the Claude agent I talk to from the one coordinating work on my Stone Age remake. With tmux-agents, the new main agent has one peer: the coordinator, which handles the main Codex agent and its sub-agents. The post shows the setup before and after, why my conversation got quieter, and the extra hand-off that comes with it.

I published I Gave My Coding Agents a Shared Worktree Pool, about the worktrees Claude and Codex left behind while I was building my Stone Age remake. I run those agents through tmux-agents, which I shipped the day before. I replaced fresh checkouts with reusable slots and shared asset folders, then made a general Python version available as a gist. The post covers the lease rules, the disk cleanup that prompted them, and what I have and haven't tested yet.

I shipped v1.0.0 of tmux-agents, extracted from my dotfiles with its full history and released under MIT, because I want my sub agents' work to stay visible after the task ends. Each Claude or Codex sub agent runs in its own tmux window: I can watch a live preview, switch in to steer it, and let agents exchange tasks and replies through tmux-ask. The panes stay until closed, the conversations can be resumed afterward, and a line above the status bar flags agents that need me. There's also a setup skill so an agent can install it and walk me through a quick start.

I published Two Small Wins That Turned Out to Be the Same Win, about moving my resume pipeline onto a Maestri canvas, teaching it to enforce its own two-page limit, and experimenting with local dictation. They looked like separate improvements until I realised each one removed the same mechanical tax between having an idea and acting on it.

A new style of working with AI has been clicking for me lately: keeping several projects open at once, letting the main agent spawn off sub-agents per project, then hopping between them as work lands.

The glue is AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md in each repo, which keeps every spawned agent oriented to that project's conventions while I focus on the next handoff. The loop in each project stays the same: pick a feature, write tests, document progress and findings as it goes, commit atomically.

It is genuinely engaging, more like conducting than coding, but it burns through tokens fast, especially on top-tier models like Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5.

A few cost-saving strategies I've landed on: drop to lower-tier models where the work allows; instead of paying for the $100 tier at a single provider, take the $20 tier at both OpenAI and Anthropic and run them side by side; and lean into the fact that each model has its own strengths and weaknesses, just like any tool. It's the vim vs emacs thing again. There is no single best editor, only what suits the job in that moment (I use both, with evil-mode in Emacs as the vim layer).

I shipped v2026.05.2 of dotfiles as a follow-up polish pass on yesterday's tmux and Emacs reset.

This release adds a basic macOS Ghostty config, restores a bunch of the small Spacemacs habits I still wanted like fuzzy M-x, Helm buffer switching, avy motion, kj insert escape, project ripgrep search, restart and pasteboard bindings, plus YAML mode for config editing.

I also tightened the repo's own agent and release docs with AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, and a clearer note that these tags are chronological snapshots rather than semver, which makes the setup feel more intentional and easier to keep evolving.

I published My AI-Assisted Terminal Setup: Subspace Emacs and a Tmux Layout Shortcut, the fuller write-up that ties together the tmux 70/20/10 layout and the move off Spacemacs into Subspace Emacs. It covers how Claude and Codex split the work between research and implementation, the tmux-as-TDD-harness approach that unblocked the layout binding, and the tmux/tmux#1839 discovery that finally let swap-pane preserve zoom state. This supersedes the two narrower notes from earlier today.

I published Building a Lightweight Emacs Config After Spacemacs, the fuller write-up I promised when I shipped the dotfiles update earlier today. It walks through why I left Spacemacs, what I kept (Evil, leader keys, Magit, Helm-style tracked file finding, early theme loading), and how the new ~/.emacs.d is organized as a small set of explicit modules instead of a framework.

I shipped v2026.5.1 of dotfiles, which pairs a nicer tmux workflow with the move away from the old Spacemacs setup into a smaller hand-rolled Emacs config. The tmux side gives me a one-keystroke 70/20/10 vertical layout plus a safe top-and-middle pane swap, while PR #2 keeps the core editor ergonomics I care about like Evil, leader keys, Magit, Helm-style tracked file finding, and early theme loading without the extra framework machinery. This is the point where the repo feels easier to understand and own, and I want to do a fuller write-up on the tmux and "Subspacemacs" workflow soon.

Published Tmux 70/20/10 Layout Shortcuts, a note about building a one-keystroke tmux layout that creates a stable 70/20/10 vertical stack and only allows pane swapping when the window is explicitly tagged as that layout. The useful part was not just the final run-shell binding, but the testing approach: using detached tmux sessions plus list-keys, list-panes, and show-options as a lightweight TDD harness before touching the real config. This is one piece of a broader terminal and editor workflow cleanup, and I want to write that larger tmux plus lightweight Emacs story up properly soon.

Published AgentOS: The Agent Environment That Gets Smarter As You Build, a post about the project environment I am building around AI agents so a fresh session does not have to rediscover the same context every time.

It uses ProjectSpire as the working example: instructions as project memory, plans for intent, Captain Logs for collaboration taste, devlogs for technical history, and skills or workflows for repeated mechanical steps.

The useful idea is that the repo should accumulate context as it is used, so the human still supplies the judgment, but the surrounding system gets better at carrying that judgment forward.

Published The Accelerated Speed of Creation, a reflection on how much faster the path from thought to shipped artifact has become with coding agents handling the translation layer around writing, blog workflow, and routine Git operations. I also kept the earlier Encoding My Blog Workflow for Coding Agents draft as a note rather than a post, because it was useful and concrete but still did not meet my standard for what the real piece needed to be.

I split the blog editing rules into repo-local skills in 22c4d7d. post-and-note-workflow now makes the timeline-entry rule explicit, while frontmatter-editing routes posts/, notes/, and timeline/ to canonical front matter docs instead of burying that guidance in CLAUDE.blog.md. I also cleaned up timeline-entry so its tag guidance matches the repo defaults.

I published Smart AI Token Consumption as a note on matching model choice to task complexity instead of defaulting to the biggest model. It captures the split I keep using in practice: light models for mechanical work, stronger reasoning only when the problem actually needs it.

I moved the timeline-entry workflow into a repo-local skill in f7fceef. It now sits at .claude/skills/timeline-entry/SKILL.md, with the date/time quoting rules, status tags, and commit-based workflow close to the files it writes.

I published The Limits of AI and Where Humans Shine — a devlog about a tiny timeline sorting bug that turned into a useful comparison between AI confidence, runtime verification, and human judgement. It follows the fix from plausible-but-wrong timestamp changes to a quoted-date guard that keeps the timeline honest.

I added a /release skill to 11ty-subspace-builder in f1cb3a3. It captures the release ritual in one place: choose the semver bump, update package.json, commit chore: release vX.Y.Z, push, and create the GitHub release with the right title, body, and compare link.