AI put a project of this size within reach. Then the code started moving faster than I could understand it.
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There are enough terminal emulators. I built rttx anyway.
I missed Tilix.
Tilix treated the terminal as a workspace. I could name a project, keep it in a sidebar, split it into panes, and return without searching through a row of identical tabs. That model still fits how I work. Tilix itself belongs to an older GNOME generation: GTK3 and D. I wanted the same idea rebuilt with GTK4 and Libadwaita.
I also wanted one thing Tilix did not give me: closing the window should not kill the work inside it.
The terminal process had to live outside the window. I needed a daemon that owned PTYs, a client/server protocol, persistence, reconnect, SSH transport, terminal state tracking, and tests that crossed Rust, GTK, GLib, VTE, Unix processes, and the filesystem.
I work on rttx outside my normal job. A few years ago, I would have looked at that list and stopped. With coding agents, I could finally attempt it.
I soon found the other side of that speed: I could build the wrong thing just as quickly.