Hello, I'm Ganesh, and I'm building LiveReview — a blast-radius aware AI code review built for your business-critical systems. Star us to help devs discover the project, give it a try, and share your feedback to help improve the product.
You heard it right; even I didn't know about this until I started understanding how terminals actually work.
We often use terminals, whether it's the default terminal in Linux, macOS, or Windows, or integrated terminals in IDEs like VS Code.
We use them to run commands, scripts, and tools to automate our work.
But, when we run a command, we often only see the output of the command, not what happens in the background.
So, in this article we will explore how terminals and shells actually work.
What Is Terminal? How does it actually work?
A terminal is a software application that provides a text-based interface to the operating system. It allows you to run commands, scripts, and tools to automate your work.
Very similar to modern-day frontend, the terminal, which is there on the monitor, is just a simple UI that displays data.
Any letter, command, or anything typed in the terminal will be constantly sent to the shell in bytes, where the shell understands these bytes and executes commands based on them.
These constant sending and receiving are done over PTY, also called pseudo-teletype, which is a pseudoterminal emulator that creates a channel between the terminal and the shell.
For example:
ls
>
my_folder
my_folder.zip
test.py
So, once you type l terminal, the terminal starts sending these bytes to the shell, and it registers in the shell. Continued with s and then followed with enter, then the shell understands it and executes the command ls and sends a response to the terminal.
How Shell Acts as the Backend of the Terminal
Any command, even your up arrow mark, left arrow mark, right arrow mark, scroll, delete, backspace, etc., is all sent in bytes to the shell, and the shell understands these bytes and executes commands based on them. and sends a response to the terminal, and you see them in your terminal.
That is why sometimes if there is some crash between any two ends, it will cause weird output in terminal ]]^A something like that.
Shell has direct access to the kernel, where it executes predefined instructions on behalf of the user's cmd.
Conclusion
Terminal, ghosty, warp, etc., are just frontends for shell which is the backend that executes commands and show results in frontend UI.
Understanding this will bring bigger idea on how we can design a system on these and how many other tools are built on top of these.
Your team's attention is limited, and the deluge of AI-generated code is making it harder to keep production reliable and secure without slowing you down.
I'm building LiveReview, a blast-radius aware AI code review built for your business-critical systems.
Instead of presenting every diff with equal emphasis, LiveReview scores each change by blast radius — how far its impact reaches through your call graph — so you can focus attention where it actually matters.
Spend code review effort where business risk is highest — not spread evenly across every diff.
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LiveReview
Blast-Radius Aware AI Code Review for Business-Critical Systems
LiveReview: Blast-Radius Aware AI Code Review for Business-Critical Systems
LiveReview is an AI code reviewer that scores every hunk of a diff by blast radius: how far a change reaches through your call graph, how much persistent state it touches, and how well-tested it is. A 3-line change to a shared auth check can outrank a 300-line UI tweak. Your team's attention goes to the highest-risk code first, not spread evenly across every diff.
blast-radius-demo.mp4
LiveReview's Blast Radius & Review Priority scoring, live in the diff viewer.
The exact math, not a black box
Visualize blast radius at a glance
Every factor that feeds the score
Here's the goal:
- A 3-line fix in a function used by 40 other files, that also writes to a database, should score high.
- A 300-line UI change in one file, fully covered by…
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