Little Control Room

Inspiration

I work across many repositories with several Codex agents running at the same time. In a normal IDE, the project list is secondary and each agent session becomes another window to remember. I wanted the opposite: one place where the portfolio of active projects is the main interface, where I can see what every agent is doing and move between them without losing context.

What it does

Little Control Room is a terminal-first IDE and control room for multi-project Codex work.

• It discovers repositories and existing Codex sessions, then embeds live sessions directly in the interface.
• One-line AI summaries show what each active agent is doing without requiring me to open every session.
• A central TODO workflow captures ideas as delayed prompts. I can press T, describe work almost exactly as I would prompt an agent, and launch it later in the main checkout or an isolated Git worktree.
• Worktrees, automated integration, and commit assistance let several tasks advance in parallel while the main project remains visible.
• Private projects and tabs are first-class concepts rather than an editing afterthought.

The result is a different way of using Codex: I enter a session, talk to the agent, leave it working, and immediately move to another project while LCR keeps the state of the whole room visible.

What changed during Build Week

Little Control Room existed before Build Week, so I have documented the boundary clearly in the repository. During July 13–21 I meaningfully extended it with a rendered-frame recording and editing workflow designed for real daily use:

• source-driven terminal recording that follows the latest development build;
• capture-time masking for private tabs and private embedded project sessions;
• privacy review of recorded frames before publication;
• smart timing that accelerates long low-activity periods while preserving meaningful typing, transitions, and the small animations that make the interface feel alive;
• automated reframing and pacing for turning long work sessions into concise demos.

The README links directly to the dated commits for each part of this Build Week work.

How I used Codex and GPT-5.6

GPT-5.6 Sol in Codex was my implementation partner for the Build Week extension. I used it to inspect the existing architecture, design the recorder around rendered terminal frames, add privacy masking at capture time, iterate on the smart-timing model, diagnose rendering edge cases, and repeatedly validate the output. Codex also helped assemble and privacy-review this demo from a much longer real working session.

GPT-5.6 Luna is used inside Little Control Room for the high-frequency management layer: project reports, automatic session summaries, classification and titles, commit-message assistance, TODO/worktree suggestions, and the final demo privacy review. Sol handles the deeper implementation work; Luna is fast and economical enough to keep the control-room view continuously useful.

Challenges and lessons

The hardest part was not recording a terminal; it was preserving the truth of a live text interface while making it safe and watchable. A single timer or marquee character changes constantly but should not define an important moment. Pauses inside typed thoughts should be compressed, while the final text needs enough time to be read before a screen transition. Privacy also has to be enforced before sensitive frames reach the recording, not patched over at the end.

Building this reinforced the product idea: when agents can work in parallel, the scarce resource is no longer typing code. It is human attention across projects. Little Control Room is designed around that bottleneck.

Running it

The public repository contains setup instructions, Build Week evidence, and testing commands. macOS and Linux are supported; Windows is not currently supported. Judges can run make tui from source, or make tui-record to exercise the new recording path.

Build Week branch and evidence: https://github.com/dpasca/LittleControlRoom/tree/spike/openai-build-week

Built With

• bubble-tea