2026-07-04
I Built Another Terminal, Unterm — Its Default User Isn't Human
Over the past six months, 80% of the commands run in my terminal weren't typed by me — Claude Code and a fleet of agents did it. But the terminals I was using — iTerm, Windows Terminal, Warp — were all designed around one person sitting there, typing one line, glancing at the output. Once the primary user switched to agents, that assumption broke in five places: commands that need to cross the firewall stall out in timeouts; handing a bare terminal to AI means handing it rm -rf too; once an agent finishes I can't rewind to see what it did; I'm already running three or four agents at once; and the more agents there are, the messier the desktop gets. This piece covers what Unterm is, where the name comes from, and how I patched each of those five problems.
