🪦 Project Graveyard: Papagei Terminal 🦜

I’m trying to get better at building in public and at celebrating projects that end up as dead ends. Take this in that spirit.

What it was

Papagei Terminal allowed a user to spin up virtual machines like they were slack channels to make it easier to use >1 Claude Code instance at the same time and make it easier to use Claude in --dangerously-skip-permissions mode.

Here is an early prototype. Future versions were way better!

What went well

I think I had a really clear idea of who this was for and the need that it was serving.

This is by far the most ambitious technical project I’ve built. I was able to use it to make meaningful code changes across several projects. I learned a bunch about working with AWS and with agents.

I actually got to the point where a tool I built was able to make code changes to other projects. That was really motivating.

Why it didn’t work / why I’m shutting it down

At the beginning of the summer, there really wasn’t a product that allowed you to use more than one Claude Code at the same time without putting real effort into understanding Git Worktrees. Conductor was experimenting here, but it was all local.

Between May when I started working on this seriously and when I got it to the point where I was really starting to enjoy using it, everyone launched a version of this and I was no longer convinced that I had something unique to bring here.

What I learned / what I would do differently next time

Realistically I probably started building this too late. I also don’t think I am embedded enough in the community of software developers to get a following here.

I wasn’t active enough in recruiting early users.

2025-11-06