Solutions
Stop hunting through terminal tabs
The fix is to group terminal sessions by the piece of work they belong to rather than by window position, so each group carries its own folder, its own notes and its own credentials, and switching context becomes switching group instead of reading tab titles.
Running coding agents turns a tidy terminal into twenty tabs that all look the same. You click through four of them to find the one waiting on a question. You lose track of which repo each is in, and which branch. Renaming tabs helps for about a day, because the names go stale as soon as the work moves on, and window position is not a filing system.
In Forkbench that group is a Thread. A Thread holds its terminal tabs, the folder they work in, the notes you granted it and the secrets its agents may use, and it carries a board showing what each agent is doing and what is blocked. Nothing in one Thread reaches into another unless you grant it, so the auth work and the billing work stop bleeding into each other. You see which agent is waiting on you from the board rather than by clicking through panes, and a Folder Banner under the terminal jumps between the directories you are actually working in with no cd.
How it works
- 1Make a Thread per piece of work, not per repository. One epic, one Thread, however many tabs it needs.
- 2Point it at its folder and open the agents you want in tabs inside it.
- 3Grant it only the notes and secrets that work needs. Everything is deny by default until you grant it.
- 4Give the Thread an objective so its agents share one backlog, and watch the board instead of the tabs.
- 5Close panes freely. A closed pane releases its claim immediately, and the board keeps the plan.