The Terminal Is My IDE

I haven't opened VS Code in two weeks. Not because I'm making a statement — because the terminal is faster for how I work.

My development environment is Claude Code running in a tmux session. 68 slash commands. 15 agents. 9 connected services. Everything I need to build, test, review, deploy, and document a product without leaving the terminal.

the daily workflow

Morning: open a tmux session, run /product-resume. Claude Code reads the handoff document from yesterday, loads the task list, checks Asana for priority items, and gives me a summary of where things stand. No context-switching. No "what was I working on?" guessing.

Pick a task. Run /plan for anything non-trivial. The planner agent breaks it into implementation steps, identifies dependencies, flags risks. I review and adjust the plan in the terminal.

Build: /tdd starts the test-driven cycle. Write a failing test, implement, verify. The TDD agent enforces the workflow — it won't let me skip the "write the test first" step.

Review: /code-review triggers a two-stage review. First pass checks spec compliance (does this do what the ticket says?). Second pass checks code quality (naming, error handling, edge cases). Both passes happen automatically.

Ship: /ship pushes the branch, creates a PR, runs CI. /land-and-deploy merges, deploys, and runs canary verification.

End of day: /handoff writes a document summarizing what was done, what's in progress, and what's blocked. Tomorrow starts with /product-resume reading that document.

tmux makes it parallel

I run 5 terminal sessions simultaneously. Each working on a different task or checking a different thing:

Session 1: Main development (Claude Code)
Session 2: Dev server + logs
Session 3: Database operations (Supabase CLI)
Session 4: Git operations + branch management
Session 5: Browser testing coordination

tmux splits and panes let me see the dev server logs while coding, check database state while testing, monitor CI while deploying. All in the terminal. No alt-tabbing between windows.

The key binding I use most: Ctrl-b z to zoom a pane to fullscreen when I need focus, then again to return to the split view.

why not VS Code?

VS Code is a great editor. But for my workflow, the overhead adds up:

Context switching. VS Code is a GUI application. My terminal is a different window. Switching between them breaks focus in a way that switching between tmux panes doesn't.

File navigation. In Claude Code, I say "read the assessment service" and it reads the file. In VS Code, I click through a tree or use Cmd-P to search. Both work. The natural language approach is faster for codebases I haven't memorized.

Integrated tools. In Claude Code, I run /security-review and get a vulnerability analysis without leaving my current context. In VS Code, that's a separate terminal, a separate tool, a separate mental model.

Agent orchestration. The 15 agents in my setup don't run in VS Code. They run in Claude Code. The planner, reviewer, TDD guide, security reviewer — they're all terminal-native. Moving to VS Code means losing the agent layer.

what I still use VS Code for

Diffs. VS Code's three-way merge view is better than anything in the terminal. When I have a complex merge conflict, I open VS Code for that one task.

Large refactors where I need to see multiple files simultaneously with syntax highlighting. The terminal shows one file at a time. VS Code shows eight.

Jupyter notebooks if I'm doing data exploration. Not common for web dev, but it happens.

the setup cost

The honest answer: it took weeks to build this setup. 68 commands, 15 agent configurations, 86 skills, 9 MCP server connections, 3 auto-hooks. Each piece was configured individually. The initial investment is significant.

The payoff is compounding returns. Every session is faster than the last because the agents learn the codebase, the commands encode best practices, and the hooks automate the mechanical work. Session 50 is dramatically more productive than session 1.

If you spend most of your day in a single codebase doing focused development, the terminal-first workflow is worth the setup investment. If you switch between 10 projects daily and each needs different tooling, VS Code's plugin ecosystem is probably better.

For solo product development? Terminal wins.