Built with agents, in public

From the outside, the line between building and generating has blurred. Here's what the work actually looks like.

## What the work looks like

ZenTerm, my terminal, recently got native git worktree management. The idea came from friction with Worktrunk, which I use daily, and a flow I liked in Herdr. I researched both, wrote the plan, and had Claude Code help me size it into 11 tickets. They shipped as 11 PRs over about 10 days.

Each ticket gets a fresh session, and we hash through it until the implementation is rock solid. While Claude builds, I'm in zen-review commenting on the diff line by line. Claude works through my comments, I fix things by hand in Neovim, and it goes through a runbook, a code review, and a Copilot review before it ships.

zenterm · worktrees● me ◐ both ○ agent

1. ideafriction with worktrunk, a flow from herdrme
2. planresearch both, write the planme
3. size11 ticketsboth
4. sessionfresh per ticket, × 11both
5. buildclaude code implementsclaude
6. reviewzen-review, line by lineme
7. reviseworks through my commentsclaude
8. polishhand fixes in neovimme
9. runbookmanual checksme
10. code reviewautomated passclaude
11. copilot reviewsecond opinioncopilot
12. mergeone pr per ticketme
13. releasegit worktrees built inme

## The part I can't prompt

What I fix by hand is mostly UI. Claude struggles with scrolling lists inside modal cards in Swift, reinvents components that already exist, and has a hard time with consistent spacing. I'll play with a focus state or a menu reveal until it feels right, and I couldn't describe right well enough to hand it off.

modal cardwhat I fix by hand

1. 1a list that has to scroll inside the card
2. 2a second button, rebuilt instead of reused
3. 3gaps between rows that don't match

That's most of the job now. Defining the problem, tearing apart the diff, rejecting bad calls. Knowing why a detail matters, what to cut, and what I'm willing to support six months from now. If something breaks, it's on me.

## Why it's hard to say out loud

When I picked up Cursor at a new job 3 years ago, I kept how much I leaned on it to myself. So did my colleagues. Our architect, it turned out, was using Claude Code all day, every day. The worry had a real basis. In a study of about 1,000 engineers, reviewers rated the engineer behind identical code as less competent when told AI helped write it.

Now there's an enormous amount of code coming out, with people running dozens of agents at once. I posted ZenTerm to r/commandline and it was gone in about five minutes for being "largely AI-generated." If that's their rule, I don't have a problem with it. The mods are unpaid and the slop is real. curl ended its bug bounty over it.

r/commandline · zenterm● me ◆ mods ○ never happened

1. 00:00posted zentermsubmissionsubmission
2. ~00:05removed · largely AI-generatedabout five minutesabout five minutes
3. —someone opens the appmy guess: a bot, off the commitsmy guess: a bot, off the commits

My guess is a bot saw Claude in my commits and flagged it without looking at the app. Simon Willison points out that tests and commit history are cheap to generate now, so skimming a repo may not show the difference anyway. Still, that's a tool judging the work without looking at the craft, which is what I was accused of.

What got me was the idea that what I built is unworthy. One friend dropped Ghostty entirely. Another, a staff engineer who'd been on iTerm for 10 years, trashed his whole config and sent me a video of it.

## Product engineer

That reaction is what I'm building for. I don't hide that my work is AI assisted, and I don't take pride in the code beyond it working and not being slop. What I care about is the face of the thing, how it feels and how people use it. I might get some flak for that. I'm a product engineer, not a neckbeard, although my girlfriend would definitely call me one given how much time I spend in the terminal.