aboutfrom apri

I am trying to build a custom terminal for agentic designers, so here's how it goes..

should I start with a story? yeah, may be a few lines.

first, excuse my english, it's my third language. i wrote this myself, no claude, so bear with me.

long story short, we now live in this new agentic workflow era, right? but i don't think it designed for us (as designers) at least not yet.

(if you've been designing with agents for a while, I can guarantee this gonna sounds familiar to you)

now, let's imagine we're working on a new design exploration.

  1. 01

    first you open your design canvas say it , , , , you named it.

  2. 02

    then you need fresh ideas, so you look for inspirations on , , , , or dig in your favorite bookmarking tool, right?

  3. 03

    you open terminal then you prompt your stuff out and attach these designs inspo, and iterate with agents, until you found the one you want to implement.

  4. 04

    because now designers should be vibe coding and implement their own design right?

  5. 05

    then you open to start a new design work, and now we're happened to learn this new thing called in conductor.

  6. 06

    it allows us to design using project's actual code without messing up our engineers work (that's nice..).

  7. 07

    then you switch between all these tools every seconds, from finding the right window, screenshotting stuff with , annotating, copy-pasting to your chat or terminal..

  8. 08

    and it's not ended there, because now if you're normal. you're gonna be using your voice dictation to type, right?

  9. 09

    but then the voice is not in because your dictation tool sucks sometimes, so you need to copy your last transcription..

  10. 10

    and then you need paste it again to the chat but ("i forgot which window, so i need to open ") to jump to my terminal or conductor and paste it again or whatever..

  11. 11

    and then we wait for the agent turns for a while, then there is no way you'll sit still just to read claude saying "bamboozling.." so..

  12. 12

    you open a new chat session to do another thing, because you're "a productive human being" right? (read: token maxxing)

  13. 13

    and you do some of these flows all over again.. and don't get me started with git flow thing..

01paper / figma / pen / claude design02mobbin / cosmos / pinterest / arena03terminal05conductor07cleanshot08dictation10raycast12new chat13git
numbers are the steps above that name them

and that's what we called (at least I called it) the agentic design workflow..

and.. this is the new normal, right? if you don't see the problem here, maybe this is not for you.

at first, I thought I was being OVERLY DRAMATIC when looking at what i've experienced so far for having to work with these multiple moving tools, with a constant of need context switching, back and forth not only through agent session but also through multiple tools across different sessions and windows just to make progress and designing stuff (I am feeling insane when I have to type this..)

back in the days, it's only figma and some moodboarding sessions, but now it's all over the place.

Then to find out that I am not the only one facing these insanity, I watched both live and hands-on interview videos on youtube ( and yt channel)

I just wanted to know how these staff designers design stuff. I thought it's gonna be different, but nope.. the story i told you above exactly how they also work these days.

No I don't want to hear "if only there is an all in one tool to cater all of these needs without having to switch multiple tools it would be great" (WRONG, YOU JUST ADD ANOTHER INSANITY). *pardon my caps

so I WAS THINKING..

yeah, right, I am not gonna deny the AI now allows me to explore and design better,

BUT are we gonna be embracing this new AGENCHAOTIC (yeah that's the word, pardon the pun) WORKFLOW just like that, and treat it like it's NORMAL?

because the process, the workflow, the back and forth between these tools just drain me so much, instead of energize me.

So, learning from what I now experienced day-to-day. it had me wonder. if we take a look at the bigger picture, we all knew that:

terminal is the glue of all these tools.

you just need the terminal to communicate with all of these tools without adding another tool to your inventory, but we all know the terminal is designed for developers, and it's cumbersome to use.

so as a naive designer, I was thinking wouldn't it be great if I can make the terminal experience more fun and enjoyable to use?

at least this gonna helps me making the new agentic design workflow more streamlined.

also I want to look cool when I am working at cafe, because opening the terminal is cool (it feels like, know what I am doing, lol).

So, to answer all of my frustration I started with a prototype taping + until it fits my workflow, i used it for a week, since then I never go back and decided to make my own native purpose-built macOS terminal for designers.

i am not gonna try to be philosophical or sound like i am inventing anything breakthrough here.

i am just trying to combine the spawn speed and keyboard-first UX from raycast, the terminal like ghostty, and the multi-worktree workflow like conductor, in one terminal that fits designers who are already used to working with coding agents.

so, let me introduce what I've been building..

it's my weekend project, i've been using it for hours every day as my daily driver since a month ago.

most of sidealong was built with sidealong itself, so every rough edge hit me first.

this is one of the most fun things I've worked on in a while, like an art project for me.

it feels like a play than work ever since (at least for me)

almost 2,000 commits and 200+ PRs later, and hours of daily use. finally I can share it with the worl.., with you :)

introducing

an opinionated terminal, purpose-built for the agentic design workflow, with design feedback tools built in.

apri

jakarta, indonesia