Multiplayer AI with tmux (linux)

Arjen Stet

4d • 💬 General discussion

You can put two people in the same AI chat session — Linux has had the tool for 20 years

In short:

=> ICM on a linux server - all files and folders that are shared with others live here

=> co-workers connecting to this server and working with the files and folders

=> tmux allows shared chatrooms with AI agents

Most AI coding tools give you a private conversation. You and the agent, in your own window. If a colleague wants to see what you are doing, you screenshot it or you paste it into chat.

There is a much older way to solve this, and it turns out to work beautifully with AI agents: tmux.

What tmux does

tmux is a terminal multiplexer. Two useful things about it:

A session keeps running when you disconnect. Close your laptop, come back

tomorrow, everything is still there.

More than one person can attach to the same session at the same time.

That second point is the interesting one. Two people attached to one tmux session see the same screen, live. Not a shared screen recording — the actual terminal, for both of them.

What that gives you with an AI agent

Run your agent inside a tmux session instead of a plain terminal, and the conversation becomes something several people can join.

Anna starts a session for the website redesign. She asks the agent to go through the stylesheets. Ben joins twenty minutes later, sees the whole conversation already there, reads what has been decided, and types the next question himself. Same agent, same context, no handover meeting.

When Anna closes her laptop, nothing stops. The session lives on the server.

Why this is worth knowing

The usual way to get shared AI sessions is a hosted platform: your conversation lives on someone else's servers so that several people can reach it.

With tmux you do not need that. The session runs on a machine you already have — a small Linux server, a virtual machine, whatever your team uses. Nothing leaves it. For anyone working with client data or under data-residency rules, that distinction matters more than any feature.

The catch, honestly

tmux only lets people attach if they are all running as the same user. So a shared session runs under one shared account, and joining it means acting as that account on that machine. That is a real trust decision — fine for a team already working on the same project, not something to hand out casually.

And because everyone types into the same input box, the conversation has one voice: you cannot tell afterwards who asked what. We work around it by having people put their name in front of their message, but it is a convention, not a guarantee.

If you want to try it

The basic idea needs no code at all — start your agent inside tmux instead of a normal terminal, and have your colleague attach to the same session.

I wrapped the rest of it (a shared account, presence, saved history, one command to join) into something installable:

https://github.com/astetic-dev/icm-platform

Happy to answer questions. And if anyone has figured out how to tell who typed what inside a shared terminal, I would love to hear it.

@Carla Bosteder

this is where Taurus development lead me. It will be a platform one day.

21 comments

Multiplayer AI with tmux (linux)