A fast terminal workflow keeps context switching low and makes automation the default. The real advantage is not nostalgia, it is leverage: once everything important is text, repeatable work becomes scriptable and the environment scales with the complexity of the problem.
That last point is the whole argument. A GUI is a destination — you go to it, you click, you come back. A text environment is a substrate. Neovim, tmux, and a handful of scripts compose because they all speak the same medium, which means the editor, the shell, the server, and the orchestration all live in one addressable space. Nothing is walled off behind a window you have to alt-tab into and manage by hand.
What this buys me in practice is an orchestration layer, not just an editor. The box is always on; I reach it over Tailscale, so the environment is identical from any machine I happen to be holding. tmux is the spine. Each project is a session. Inside a session, the windows are roles: one where I mediate the agents, one running the server, one or two for utility work. The layout is the same everywhere, so I never spend attention reconstructing context — it's already arranged.
The interesting constraint is parallelism bounded by attention. I keep two projects live and hotkey between them, because two is what fits in working memory; a third just degrades all three. While an agent works the first project, I flip to the second, hand it the next prompt, and let it run. By the time I flip back, the first is ideally done and waiting. The human role has quietly shifted from author to scheduler — keeping the agents busy building while I move between fronts.
The honest gap is the feedback edge of that loop. Right now I poll: I flip over and check whether an agent has finished. The missing primitive is a notification that tells me when one is idle and waiting, so I'm reacting to completion instead of guessing at it. Closing that — and bringing more capable agents like pi or hermes into the rotation — is the next real gain.
The terminal scales with the problem because it was never really an editor. It's a control plane, and a control plane is exactly what this kind of work now demands.