Across every project in the studio, our default dev shape is two terminal tabs:
- The gateway — the long-running process.
npm run dev,firebase emulators,xcode build, whatever the project needs to be alive. - The TUI — Claude Code, doing real work. Edits, refactors, scaffolding, tests.
It sounds obvious. It took us a while to land on it.
Why two tabs and not one
A combined "vibe coding" shell where you flip between commands and AI inside the same prompt sounds elegant but breaks fast. You can't see the dev server's logs while you're talking to the model. You can't kill a hung server without losing context. You can't tail two things at once.
Two tabs is the smallest correct number.
Why not three
Three is the next stable shape — gateway, TUI, and a scratch tab for one-off commands. We use this when a project's getting complex. But for most work, the scratch shell lives inside the TUI's !command escape, and you don't need a third tab.
Caveat
This works for one developer at a time. For collaborative sessions, the shape changes — usually a Tuple or VS Code Live Share window replaces the TUI entirely, and the gateway becomes shared output everyone watches together.