Terminal for Agentic Development — Developer Documentation
Your terminal was built for humans typing commands. Your workflow isn’t.
You run Claude Code in one tab. Aider in another. A manual shell for git operations in a third. Maybe Cursor’s agent mode in VS Code on the side. You’re orchestrating 3-5 AI agents working on the same codebase — and your terminal has no idea.
Ocean was built for exactly this.
If you’re using AI coding agents daily, you’ve hit these walls:
Agents step on each other. Two agents edit the same file. You only find out when git merge explodes. By then, both agents have built 50 lines on top of conflicting foundations, and you’re spending 30 minutes untangling the mess.
Worktrees are expensive. The “safe” approach is one git worktree per agent. Each costs ~2GB of disk, needs its own npm install, causes port conflicts, and takes minutes to set up. For 4 agents, that’s 8GB of duplicated state before you write a line of code.
You can’t see what’s happening. Which agent is stuck waiting for input? Which one finished? Is your laptop melting? You cycle through tabs, run ps aux, check htop, and lose 5 minutes of context every time.
Terminal output is dead text. An agent prints a file path — you copy-paste it into your editor. It prints an error — you copy-paste it back to the agent. In 2026, this is still the workflow.
When you spawn a session in Ocean, it creates a copy-on-write (COW) overlay of your codebase. Not a full copy — just a thin delta layer that stores only what changes. A new session costs kilobytes, not gigabytes. It spawns in milliseconds, not minutes.
Traditional workflow:
git worktree add ../agent-1 → 2GB, 3 minutes, npm install
git worktree add ../agent-2 → 2GB, 3 minutes, npm install
Total: 4GB disk, 6 minutes
Ocean workflow:
Spawn child session (Cmd+N) → ~50KB, instant
Spawn another (Cmd+N) → ~50KB, instant
Total: ~100KB disk, <1 second
Dependencies like node_modules/ are shared read-only across all sessions. No duplication. No reinstalls.
Because Ocean controls the filesystem layer, it knows the moment two sessions modify the same file — not at merge time, but as it happens.
Conflicts are classified by severity:
You see this in real-time as colored badges on each session pane. No surprises at merge time.
When conflicts do arise, Ocean gives you a complete resolution toolkit:
3-way merge engine — Ocean computes the base, yours, and theirs for every conflicting file and offers per-hunk resolution: Accept A, Accept B, Accept Both, Accept Base, or Manual Edit.
AI-assisted merge — Click “AI Suggest” on any conflict. Ocean sends the three versions to Claude, which produces a merged result with a confidence score. Review, accept, or edit.
Merge queue — When 4 agents finish at the same time, Ocean computes the optimal merge order based on conflict complexity. Merge the easy ones first, leaving the hard ones for focused attention.
Pre-conflict warnings — Before a conflict even exists, Ocean alerts you when two sessions start editing the same file. Lock the file, or let them continue and resolve later.
Stash and undo — Save your session state mid-merge with a label. Every merge creates an automatic snapshot — one-click rollback if the result is wrong.
Dependency graph — Declare that “Session B depends on Session A” and Ocean enforces merge order. No more merging B before A’s changes are in the base.
Ocean monitors your agents and tells you when they need attention. If an agent has been waiting for input for 30 seconds, the pane header turns yellow. If the window is in the background, you get a desktop notification. No more checking tabs to see which agent is stuck.
Ocean detects AI agents automatically — Claude Code, Codex, Aider, Cursor, Copilot, Cody, Gemini, Devin. Each gets a colored badge in the pane header. The Agent Dashboard (Cmd+Shift+J) shows all agents across all workspaces with their lifecycle state.
┌─────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┐
│ ● claude auth-module │ ● aider test-suite │
│ ⚡ High | Opus 4.6 │ ⚡ Med | Sonnet 4.6 │
│ ~/project $ │ ~/project $ │
│ Working on login flow...│ Writing unit tests... │
├─────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┤
│ ● shell manual │
│ ~/project $ git status │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Every file path, URL, error, and stack trace in terminal output is clickable. Click a file path to open it. Click an error to trigger an agent fix. Right-click for context actions. No more copy-paste gymnastics.
Ocean organizes work as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). A workspace represents a task. Sessions within it represent parallel work streams. Child sessions inherit their parent’s code state. When work is done, you merge it back.
Workspace: "Auth Refactor"
├── base (main branch snapshot)
├── Session 1: Claude → login flow
│ ├── Session 1a: Claude → OAuth integration
│ └── Session 1b: Aider → login tests
├── Session 2: Cursor → signup flow
└── Session 3: manual shell → monitoring
This replaces the mental overhead of managing branches, worktrees, and merge conflicts with a visual, intuitive model.
When you’re done, Cmd+Shift+S translates your Session DAG back to git:
Running a dev server in a session? Right-click the detected port to create a public tunnel instantly via Bore or Cloudflared. Share the URL with a teammate or test on a mobile device. Ocean auto-installs the tunnel provider on first use.
Ocean includes a visual settings panel for configuring Claude Code context. No more CLI flags and manual CLAUDE.md editing:
All of this previously required CLI knowledge. Ocean makes it point-and-click.
Ocean is not an IDE. It doesn’t replace VS Code or Cursor. It’s your terminal — but built for how you actually work in 2026: orchestrating AI agents, monitoring parallel execution, and shipping code that multiple agents wrote simultaneously.
Ocean is open-source, local-first, and runs entirely on your machine. No cloud dependency. No telemetry unless you opt in. No lock-in.