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Tutorial 01 · Living terminal bot cards

Your terminal, with a pulse.

Turn the Claude Code, Codex, or Grok Build session already running in a terminal into a living agent card. The process keeps running in the same PTY, so you can switch views at any time without losing the session.

About 4 minutesNo API setupSame live PTY

Quick start

1

Start an agent normally

Open a PorkiCoder terminal in your project and launch claude, codex, or grok. Sign in through the provider CLI if it asks.

2

Show the AI panels

Press ⌘P or use the HOGSPHERE view control. PorkiCoder replaces supported raw terminal panes with living cards while their PTYs continue underneath.

3

Read the live agent state

Use the card composer to send the next prompt. The card reports WORKING, YOUR TURN, IDLE, SHELL, or STALLED with elapsed time, context, output, turns, six recent work entries, and queued follow-ups.

The important bit: card mode is a view over the existing terminal. It does not create a second chat, copy the conversation, or restart the CLI.

Work directly from the card

The card composer writes to the same PTY input as the raw terminal. That means the provider receives exactly the same prompt it would receive if you typed into xterm.

  • Send a prompt: type in the composer and submit it while the agent is waiting.
  • Interrupt: stop a run from the card when the current direction is not useful.
  • Write more: expand the composer for a longer specification or handoff.
  • Paste an image: use Ctrl+V for Codex. Use ⌘V for the other supported CLIs; card mode inserts a temporary local path when needed.

If the agent opens an interactive screen that is easier to operate directly, switch that pane back to raw terminal view. The underlying process is already there.

Mix cards and raw terminals

Card view is pane-specific. In a multi-panel layout you can keep two agents as cards and expose the third as a raw CLI. Use the terminal control on an individual card to reveal that pane, then restore its card when you are done.

Pressing ⌘P cycles the overall view: show AI panels, restore any panes you temporarily made raw, then return to the single raw terminal view.

A good setup: keep long-running Claude and Codex tasks visible as cards, and leave the pane you are actively steering in raw terminal mode. You get a compact status wall without giving up direct terminal control.

What the local 77M model does

PorkiCoder extracts the card state from the terminal output on your Mac. Its shipped 77-million-parameter namer gives each submitted turn a short label without making a naming API call.

The measured 29.3 ms figure is warm title-model inference on our M4 Max CPU benchmark. It describes the naming pass, not total interface latency and not every Mac configuration.

Manual tab names remain authoritative. The local model labels the work; it does not replace the provider agent or decide what the agent should do.

If a card is not updating

  1. Confirm the terminal is running Claude Code, Codex, or Grok Build in the foreground.
  2. Switch the pane to raw terminal view and check whether the CLI is waiting on an interactive menu, login, or pager.
  3. Return to card view with ⌘P after the provider is back at its normal conversation surface.
  4. For newly installed PorkiCoder features, start a fresh terminal session so it receives the current integration configuration.