Conduit

The deciding trait is that you arrange the workspace once and then stop arranging it. Panes go where you want them, the layout locks, and every new task opens into the same shape instead of into whatever the window manager felt like. For work where four things are running and three of them are waiting on you, that stability is most of the value.

The catch is that it is one platform and one author. Pick it if you are on a Mac and already juggling parallel work. Pick a multiplexer you already know if you are not.

Calling a split terminal a sandbox is generous. Separate worktrees stop two agents from editing the same checkout, which is a real and useful property, and they stop nothing else. Every session runs as the same user, reaches the same home directory, reads the same credentials and can install the same global packages. One careless command is not contained by a branch.

What it does right is automate the worktree entirely. The mechanism most people get wrong by hand is created and cleaned up for you, which removes the usual reason not to parallelise.

1. Separating the review surface from the conversation is a considered choice with a real consequence: the reader checks the repository's actual state rather than the model's account of it, and those two diverge exactly when it matters most. 2. Keeping staging and commit in the same pane means the human approval step happens where the evidence is.

2. The design is asserted through product documentation only. There is no published evaluation, and for a workspace layout the meaningful measurement would be human error rates, which nobody in this category collects.

Free with no stated terms is not a price, it is a decision deferred. The repository ships binaries and nothing to read, which means an adopter has no rights, no obligations and no notice period, and the author has kept every commercial option open. That is sensible for a builder and unpriceable for a buyer.

Moat: the workflow habit it creates, which is genuinely sticky once a team's layout lives here. Likely path: a paid tier, or an acqui-hire that ends the download. Position: enjoy it, and keep your worktrees reproducible without it.

I cannot roll out a tool that covers part of the fleet and costs an unknown amount later. Half my engineers are on another platform, and for the other half the current price of zero is a statement about today rather than a contract. Finance will not approve a line that has no number and legal will not approve terms that do not exist.

There is no console, no directory login, no audit trail and nothing that runs unattended, so it never becomes a step I can measure. Not yet.

The scripting surface is genuinely good. A command-line interface into the workspace means an agent can open its own tabs and arrange its own panes, and defining an agent once then recalling it by slash command from any terminal is the sort of ergonomics I usually have to write myself.

Then it stops. No source, no licence, no protocol support, and a fork is not a thing that can exist. I am renting ergonomics from someone who has not told me the terms, and every extension I write lives on the outside of a box I cannot open.