We grew up dialing into bulletin boards with 14.4k modems, writing chat scripts to get PPP running, waiting for ATZ OK ATDT to negotiate a connection. We installed Slackware off floppy disks and compiled our own kernels because the stock one didn't support our sound cards. We read Phrack, learned what FXP was before we probably should have, and spent hours on EFnet arguing about window managers.
The terminal was the interface to all of it. IRC, email, code, system administration. Everything happened in a shell. You learned how things worked because you had to.
Most of us ended up in software and systems engineering. We still live in terminals. And we kept running into the same friction: getting a shell on your own machine from somewhere else is harder than it should be.
Now AI coding agents run in terminals too. Claude Code, Codex, Aider. They need sessions that stay alive for hours, on real machines, reachable from anywhere. The same problems we've been solving for ourselves suddenly matter for everyone. Real VMs with real shells matter more now than ever.
Every tool we ship exists because we hit a wall doing our own work and built our way through it.
latch
Terminal multiplexer with built-in SSH server and web terminal. tmux that you can SSH into. Go, MIT.
shells
Managed Linux VMs with 200+ tools pre-installed. SSH in from anywhere. Web terminal. Mobile app.
relay
SSH jump infrastructure across 9 network exchange points. Connect to your machines through any NAT.
clone
Lightweight Linux VMM. Boots VMs from memory snapshots using Shadow Clone page mapping. Rust, MIT.
army
Multi-host VM orchestrator. REST API for managing fleets of Clone VMs across bare metal. Go.
mobile app
SSH and Mosh client for iOS and Android. Auto-discovers relay devices and shells. Flutter, MIT.
dev browser
Android browser with Chrome DevTools built in. Inspect, debug, and run Lighthouse on your phone.
clone, latch, mosh-go, the mobile app, the dev browser, and our core libraries are open source, MIT licensed, on GitHub. We grew up on free software. We wouldn't know how to write code without the people who published theirs for us to read. The paid part is the hosted service: the servers, the bandwidth, the engineering to keep it running.