Yardsort

Ordered by risk first, then by the shortest path to something usable daily. Every milestone must pass on Linux, macOS and Windows before it is done — CI enforces the build, a short manual checklist covers what CI can't see.

M0 — Scaffold ✅

Tauri 2 + React + TS + Vite + bun; lint/format (clippy, rustfmt, eslint, prettier).
GitHub Actions matrix: ubuntu / macos / windows — build, cargo test, frontend tests.
Typed IPC generation wired up. Empty three-panel shell with resizable panels.

Exit: a signed-or-not installer artifact is produced for all three OSes on every push to main (pull requests run the check matrix only — macOS minutes are billed at 10x on private repos).

M1 — Terminal spike (highest risk, do first) ✅

pty-host crate on portable-pty, with the message-shaped API (spawn / attach / write / resize / kill + events) and no Tauri dependencies — in-process for now, daemon-ready.
xterm.js view; raw-byte channel output with batching; input; resize.
Headless VT state in the host → snapshot on attach. Detach/re-attach across workspace switches.
Login-shell environment resolution.
Run a plain shell, then claude, in the center panel.
WebGL renderer with automatic DOM-renderer fallback; evaluate the WebKitGTK/NVIDIA mitigations.

Exit: a full-screen TUI (Claude Code, plus vim/htop as torture tests) is usable — colours, resize, mouse, paste, unicode — on all three OSes, including Hyprland/Wayland. Throughput test: cat a large file without freezing the UI. Record a go/no-go on Linux webview rendering, with numbers (frame times while a harness streams, WebGL vs DOM), before starting M2.

Result: go on Linux — see 07-terminal-benchmarks. macOS and Windows are covered by CI (build + PTY integration tests) but still need a hands-on pass and benchmark rows.

SQLite store + migrations. Open project / create project (with git init + initial commit).
Sidebar tree with local. Selecting local opens a shell tab at the repo root.
Persist selection, panel sizes, expansion state.

Exit: add, reorder and remove projects; restart the app and everything is where you left it.

Notes: reordering is "Move up / Move down" in the project menu for now — HTML5 drag-and-drop in Tauri webviews needs the window's native drop handling disabled, which is better decided together with dropping files onto terminals. Sessions carry a workspace label in the PTY host, which is how tabs find their workspace again after a webview reload (and, later, after attaching to the daemon).

M3 — Workspaces (the core loop) ✅

git module: root / default-branch detection, worktree add / list / remove.
Composer UI: harness, model, effort, base branch, message.
Start → worktree + branch + harness launch with argv prompt transport.
Built-in harness definitions (hard-coded, no settings UI yet). Naming + slugging.
Failure handling: nothing half-created is left behind.

Exit: from a cold start, create three workspaces in one project on different harnesses and watch them work in parallel. This is the first version worth dogfooding.

Notes: a basic "Delete workspace" came forward from M6, because a loop that can only create litters: the folder goes, the branch always stays, and uncommitted work needs a second explicit confirmation. Rename, archive and "delete the branch too" remain in M6. Harness sessions are labelled in the PTY host with their harness and (where we assign one) the harness's own session id, ready for M6's resume and fork.

Two follow-ups landed right after M3, from dogfooding:

Open an existing branch. The composer's branch picker has two groups: New branch from… and Open existing branch (only branches nobody has checked out — git allows a branch in one worktree at a time). This is how a branch kept by a delete comes back as a workspace. Yardsort never deletes a branch it did not create, not even when undoing a failed start.
Adoption. Whenever projects are listed, worktrees git knows about but Yardsort does not become workspaces — ones made by hand, and ones orphaned when their project was removed and added again. Stale ("prunable") entries are skipped. This brought forward part of M6's reconciliation.

M4 — Harness settings ✅

Settings file + override model. Settings → Harnesses form, argv preview, PATH detection, Test launch, Restore defaults, custom harnesses.
stdin prompt transport with readiness detection.
Re-verify every default in 04-harnesses end-to-end on each OS.

Exit: a harness Yardsort has never heard of can be added and used without touching code.

Notes: the settings file stores only differences from the built-ins, so corrected defaults in a later version still reach everything the user left alone. Settings also cover the worktree folder and the branch prefix. Still open from this milestone: exercising every built-in end-to-end with a real prompt on macOS and Windows (flags are verified against --help; Claude Code is verified by hand on Linux), and the stdin transport against a harness that shows a trust or login dialog first — the paste would land in that dialog. WSL launch prefixes remain an open question.

M5 — Right panel ✅

File watcher (debounced, .gitignore-aware). Changes tab (uncommitted + committed vs merge-base).
Files tab. Diff viewer + read-only file viewer. Open in editor.

Exit: while an agent works, the changes list and open diff update live, and stay responsive in a large repo (test against one with a big node_modules).

Notes: the diff viewer is CodeMirror 6's unified merge view (settling open question 9), loaded lazily with its grammars. Diffs cross IPC as the two versions of the file, not as a patch, so the viewer decides how much context to show. The watcher never interprets events: after a burst goes quiet it says "something changed" and the UI asks git again. On Linux it watches exactly the directories git does not ignore (inotify is per-directory, and a recursive watch would descend into node_modules), adding folders as they appear; macOS and Windows use one recursive watch and filter events through the ignore rules. Staging, committing and discarding from the panel are not part of this milestone.

M6 — Session lifecycle ✅

Session records; Resume / Fork / New session; restore-on-launch (lazy: a workspace shows its past conversations when it is opened — nothing is started until asked).
Status dots from PTY activity; desktop notification when a busy agent goes quiet.
Shell tabs alongside harness tabs. Rename / archive / restore / delete workspace with safety prompts.
Worktree reconciliation: unknown worktrees are adopted (M3); a workspace whose folder vanished is flagged and can be restored from its branch or deleted.

Exit: quit mid-task, relaunch, and be back in the same conversations within a couple of clicks.

Result: verified by hand on Linux with Claude Code — app killed mid-session, relaunched, workspace restored with the conversation listed as "interrupted", one click on Resume and the conversation was back. Fork checked against the same conversation (the copy keeps the context and is saved under the id we chose, so it is resumable too).

Notes:

Harnesses that choose their own session ids (Codex, OpenCode) can only continue their most recent conversation in a folder; older records say so instead of offering a Resume that would open the wrong one. Reading their session stores would lift this (open question 12).
Found while testing: when Yardsort is started from a terminal inside an agent, that agent's session markers (CLAUDECODE, CLAUDE_CODE_CHILD_SESSION, …) leaked into the harnesses, and Claude Code then refuses to save its transcript. The launch environment now drops them.

M7 — Ship

Done:

Licence: GPL-3.0. Dependency licences checked for compatibility (all MIT / Apache-2.0 / BSD-style / MPL-2.0).
Open-source groundwork: README with screenshots, quick start, a user guide for every part of the app, CONTRIBUTING, Code of Conduct, SECURITY, issue and PR templates, AGENTS.md.
Pre-publication audit of the repository and its whole history for secrets and personal data.
Release workflow: a v* tag builds AppImage + deb + rpm, a universal dmg and NSIS + MSI into a GitHub release, published once every platform has built; just release <version> cuts one. macOS signing and notarization switch on when the Apple secrets are set. See releasing.

To do:

Exit: v0.1.0 public release.

Later (unordered)

Commit / push / open PR from the UI; show PR + CI status on the workspace row.
Per-project setup script and "files to copy into new worktrees" (.env etc.); run/dev-server button.
yardsortd: move the PTY host out of process so agents survive closing the window (boundary already in place from M1; see open questions for lifecycle).
Merge / rebase helpers; "apply this workspace onto local".
Diff comments sent back to the agent as a prompt.
Multi-repo projects; remote/SSH workspaces.
Usage / cost view per workspace. MCP config management per harness.
Command palette; themes; Omarchy theme integration.

Roadmap