about

I'm building a custom terminal for agentic designers, here's how it started..

by Aprianil Sesti Rangga

sidealong darkdark

bear with me, english is my third language and i wrote this myself, no claude.

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

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

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

  1. 01

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

  2. 02

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

  3. 03

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

  4. 04

    because now designers should be vibe coding and implementing their own designs, right?

  5. 05

    then you open to start a new design work, and now we happen to be learning 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 second, from finding the right window, screenshotting stuff with , annotating, copy-pasting to your chat or terminal..

  8. 08

    and it doesn't end there, because now, if you're normal, you're gonna be using your voice dictation to type, right?

  9. 09

    but then the voice doesn't go in, because your dictation tool sucks sometimes, so you need to copy your last transcription..

  10. 10

    and then you need to paste it into the chat again, 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's turn for a while, and 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 on the 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 call (or at least what I call) 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 looking at what i've experienced so far, having to work with all these moving tools, constantly context switching, going back and forth not only between agent sessions but also between multiple tools across different sessions and windows, just to make progress and design stuff (I feel insane having to type this..)

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

Then, to find out if I was the only one facing this insanity, I watched both live and hands-on interview videos on youtube (the and yt channels)

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

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

so I WAS THINKING..

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

BUT are we just gonna embrace 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 energizing me.

So, learning from what I experience day-to-day, it got me wondering. if we take a look at the bigger picture, we all know 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 could make the terminal experience more fun and enjoyable to use?

at least this is gonna help me make the new agentic design workflow more streamlined.

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

a macbook on a cafe table, open to an early draft of this letter

So, to answer all of my frustrations, I started with a prototype, taping + together until it fit my workflow. i used it for a week, never went 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 groundbreaking here.

i am just trying to combine the spawn speed and keyboard-first UX from raycast, a 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 late august..

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. it feels more like an art project than work.

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.

made for macmacOS 15 or later

apri

jakarta, indonesia