“What is the terminal?”

In his keynote talk at the first Perl conference, Larry Wall couldn’t get the Windows computer on the podium to behave. So he SSH’d into his own machine and said, with relief and joy: “Home sweet home”. Three decades on, software developers still live in the terminal, now more than ever as coding agents dethrone the integrated environments that held sway for so long. IDEs recede as we do less writing and editing, more reading and reviewing. If you watch developers at work today, you are likely to see them in the terminal at a command prompt. It’s not your grandfather’s command prompt, though, it’s a terminal-based agent like Claude Code or Codex. These agents are maestros of the underlying command shell; they wield its powers far more effectively than most of us can. If you care to, this is a great way to learn by doing. Don’t take a course or watch a video to learn about git, just watch how agents use it in all its glorious complexity. But what if you don’t care about those commands?…