A mental health feature for people who work with agents

It's late. The review agent has found one more thing: a boundary case in a regex. The coding agent fixes it, opens another PR, and the reviewer finds the next one. Some nights that's dozens of PRs, and none of them is wrong.

I didn't want to scold anyone. I wanted to hit something.

What actually wears me out?

Not the big failures. A broken build is easy: you're angry for a minute and you fix it. These are the ones that wear me down.

• The review that never ends. One agent writes, another reviews, and the reviewer always has a nitpick. A person knows when to say "good enough." An agent forgets it's allowed to say no, and keeps polishing the same corner.
• The side quest. Halfway through task A it trips over task B, and puts all its energy into B. A is forgotten.
• Pulling teeth. It stops at some boring little spot and tells me what it did, but not what comes next. I ask, it moves one step, it stops again.
• The silent decisions. The work is done, and the choices it made along the way aren't mentioned. Ask, and you get a little more.

None of these is a bug. That's why they're so tiring.

Why would a terminal need therapy?

Plenty of tools help agents work better. I haven't found one that asks how the person on the other end feels at that moment.

You can type "seriously?" into the prompt. It doesn't help. You can walk away, which is the right call, and not always possible.

I wanted a third option: something you can do right now, with one click, that's a little funny. If a bad afternoon can at least be absurd, I can stay in the work.

What's on the rack?

At the bottom left of the Inspector there's a sofa button. Click it and a rack opens: three weapons and three spells. Pick one and click the terminal. It's called Terminal Therapy. Here's each tool in action.

Hammer lands right where you click. The text slips and cracks and the screen shakes, but nothing burns. It's the one for the fifth "You're absolutely right."

Pistol fires a short way ahead along a dashed aim line that follows the way you move the pointer. It leaves a small charred pit. It's what I'd type "seriously?" with.

Rocket Launcher flies farther and blows a crater with a glowing rim. It needs a moment to reload, which is probably healthy. This is for when it rewrote the whole package. Again.

You hold a weapon until you put it away. Spells are used once.

What are the spells for?

Bless is my favorite. A column of light comes down, every mark you left is cleared, and the text glows gold for a few seconds. The practical part is that the screen is clean again. But I also think of it as a small superstition. You make a wish for the next run: first try, no surprises. I know it does nothing to the agent. I do it anyway.

Ignite and Freeze don't mean anything. Sometimes you just want to burn the whole thing down, or freeze it right where it stands. Fire spreads from your click for about five seconds and leaves scorch marks. Frost covers the screen and thaws away by itself, leaving nothing behind. A new spell replaces the one still showing.

Your turn: the original post on ponymux.com has the real rack running in the page, and every tool works.

How does it work?

Everything is drawn in PonyMux's own renderer, on top of the terminal's output.

It's built on Ghostty's renderer, with a custom patch so the renderer knows where you clicked. That's why it's PonyMux-only. You can't just drop a shader into another terminal and get this.

The damage stays after you put a weapon away. The × beside the sofa clears it, so does Bless, and so does restarting the terminal. Nothing is saved.

Sounds are off by default. Turn them on at the bottom of the rack. If macOS has Reduce Motion on, nothing flies or shakes; the damage just appears.

And if you keep firing for long enough, the terminal will eventually have something to say. I'll leave you to find it.

Serious work should still feel alive. Even the bad afternoons.

Everything the tools do, one by one, is in the Terminal Therapy docs. PonyMux is free for macOS: ponymux.com/download.