Crank

Feb 2026 · age 44

What it was

A Kotlin and JavaFX desktop cockpit for running a hundred SSH sessions at once, built with an AI agent in eleven days. One window held a tree of sessions on the left and the selected terminal on the right. Each session had a five-block bandwidth meter scaled to the busiest one in the fleet, folders rolled up status, and a Focus Mode sorted the sessions that had gone quiet to the top. Under the glass sat a hand-written VT100 emulator with truecolor, alternate screens and a 10,000-line scrollback, a tuned SSH client, reconnects with exponential backoff and jitter, and a startup command that reattached every session to its own named tmux on the remote host. It worked. The emulator lacked mouse reporting, wide characters and reflow, and nothing was tested.

Wins, for the age

• At forty-four, Jeff saw that at a hundred sessions you stop reading text and start reading silhouettes, and made the fleet legible as shapes, finding on their own what Datadog's host maps had already found.
• Hunted the dropped connections below the SSH protocol, turned off three hidden timeouts, and left a comment on each explaining the symptom it cured. Stop disconnecting, rather than reconnect harder.
• Made a session a name on the remote rather than a socket on the laptop, one line of configuration buying survival across any failure.
• Wrote an honest tradeoff analysis measuring the custom emulator against mature ones and recommending the library that should replace it. A primate grading their own homework, fairly.

What it taught

• SSH connections die in NIO timeouts and NAT keepalives, and the fix is configuration found by comparing against OpenSSH's defaults.
• A terminal emulator's parser is a weekend; mouse modes, wide characters and reflow are a decade.
• Directing an agent is a workflow, and it can produce a real application in eleven days. It also produced agent notes describing an architecture the code did not have.
• Default to strict host keys, and test the parser. A fresh machine silently trusted any host, and no test ever ran.

Genealogy

Ancestors: none on record. It arrived fully formed in a single first commit. Descendants: none on record. The fleet-visibility idea is still waiting for its heir.

Epitaph

Here lies Crank. It turned a hundred terminals into a hundred little bar charts, each one a tmux name away from surviving a laptop in a lake, and lived eleven days.