An Agent over Your Shoulder

The other day I was doing some ops work, live migrating some VMs from one physical host to another, as we sometimes need to do. This process is nearly transparent (except a pause) to our users, but I wanted an extra set of “attention heads” on it, so I built shoulder (as in “look over your shoulder.”)

With shoulder, you start a terminal and run shoulder, which runs bash inside of it, but not before offering a bunch of ways to connect to it. If your agent is local, you can connect locally, but you can connect from anywhere with tailcat. The agent can see and control your terminal, which makes it good enough to read your logs and highlight something you may have missed.

Or you can be silly and have Luna play Tetris poorly. That works too.

My first iteration here had a TUI with a split screen, with the agent on one half and the terminal in the other, much like a custom tmux layout. I tried it and I hated it: my preferred agent is one thing (it happens to be Shelley in a web browser) and my preferred terminal is another (it happens to be Ghostty), and it’s much better to bridge the two!