# Product

## Register

product

## Users

A single technical operator (a developer) managing every interactive shell and
agent — Claude Code, opencode, plain bash — running across multiple machines.
The job-to-be-done: from any device (laptop, desktop, **phone**), get an
accurate at-a-glance picture of all live sessions across all hosts, then attach
to one and drive its terminal. Usage is often glance-and-go: checking on a
long-running agent, killing a stray session, or hopping into a shell mid-task.
Mobile-first is a hard requirement — touch targets, viewport-fit safe areas,
and bottom-sheet modals already reflect this.

## Product Purpose

Maestro is a unified terminal-session orchestrator: one place to see and attach
to every interactive session running across every machine the operator cares
about. tmux for persistence, WebSocket for transport, a daemon-per-host
federated by a small always-on registry. The web UI is the browser face of
that system — it renders the cross-host session catalog and provides the attach
terminal (xterm.js). Success = the operator trusts the picture is accurate and
current, and can get from "open the page" to "typing in the right session" in
seconds, on any device.

## Brand Personality

Three words: **precise, calm, alive.** This is infrastructure tooling — it must
read as trustworthy and exact, never toy-like — but it watches living
processes, so status must feel present and current, not static. Voice is terse
and technical, matching the CLI and the repo's terse house style. It is a
craftsman's tool: opinionated, monospace-literate, with quiet personality
rather than decoration. Emotional goals: in control / confident, fast /
efficient, calm / uncluttered, with earned moments of delight.

## Anti-references

- Generic Tailwind-admin / SaaS-cream dashboards.
- Heavy gradients, glassmorphism, glass cards as decoration.
- Playful, rounded, "friendly app" aesthetics that undercut the
  infrastructure-tool trust.
- Whitespace-maximalist layouts that trade away the at-a-glance scan for
  "elegance."
- Anything where you could guess the design from the category alone
  ("terminal tool → CRT-green-on-black novelty"): the orchestrator identity is
  earned through restraint, not costume.

## Design Principles

1. **The scan is the product.** Optimize for instant comprehension of "what's
   running, where, and is it healthy" across many sessions and hosts. Status
   legibility beats everything else.
2. **Calm under load.** Stay uncluttered whether there are 3 sessions or 300;
   hierarchy and grouping carry the weight, not color-shouting every row.
3. **Fast and keyboard-literate.** Low-friction, efficient, gets out of the
   way; honor keyboard navigation, don't make the operator hunt.
4. **Monospace as identity.** Treat the mono/sans pairing as deliberate brand
   typography, not just terminal output. Ids, hosts, counts, and state read as
   precise technical data.
5. **Earned delight.** Personality lives in motion and micro-detail (live-status
   pulse, attach transitions, cursor cues), never in noise — always craft.

## Accessibility & Inclusion

Standard good practice, applied rigorously: WCAG AA contrast for all text and
status, visible keyboard focus on every interactive element, and a full
`prefers-reduced-motion` alternative for every animation. Status must never rely
on color alone (pair the dot with a label/shape). Dark and light themes are
equal citizens, driven entirely by CSS custom-property tokens.