Terminal-native coding workflows: shipping without leaving the shell

Plenty of coding tools treat the IDE as the centre of gravity. For a lot of us it is not. The terminal is already where the build runs, where the tests run, where git and the deploy scripts live, and it does that across every language without asking you to commit to one editor. An agent that lives there too, as a single binary rather than a panel wedged into an IDE, slots into that habit instead of fighting it.

The most obvious win is that there is nothing to switch into. No separate app, no extra window, no lock-in to one editor. You are standing in the directory anyway, so you say what you want and the agent works right where you would have. When it finishes you are back at the prompt, ready to run whatever it just changed. Intent to running code, one window, no detour.

It also composes with everything else you already script. The agent runs your real build and test commands rather than its own reimplementation of them, so its definition of passing is your CI's definition of passing. You can pipe it, redirect it, and chain it the way you would any other command, because that is what it is.

And it keeps you in the loop by default. Changes arrive as diffs, with an explanation, gated before anything is written. You look, you approve, it runs the checks. That kind of review matters more for an autonomous agent, not less, and the terminal is the natural place for it because reading a diff is already part of how you work there.

That is the shape of Pier: read the repo, plan across files, run commands, ship, all without leaving the shell. The use cases show it on concrete jobs, from adding an endpoint to fixing a failing CI build, each one a terminal session you could have typed yourself.

Staying in the terminal also makes it clear what leaves your machine. The code runs where you run it, from one local binary, and you can watch exactly what gets sent out and what does not. If that is something you care about, the security page spells out what stays local and what we never keep.