I built it for my terminal. A week later, strangers were fixing it for each other

Friday 2 Oct: built for me

Every day I watch Claude Code print tables as pipes and dashes. prismantis is my fix: a Claude Code mod that redraws replies with colored tables, highlighted code and mermaid charts. I launched it on 2 Oct and shipped 8 releases that afternoon, most of the code written by Claude with me saying "almost" at screenshots.

I use it all day. That is the whole reason it exists. Every reply in my terminal now draws the way I wanted it to, and a chart showing up where a wall of text used to be makes me smile every time.

It was tested on exactly one setup: my Mac, my terminal, my window size.

Sunday 4 Oct: other people

16 stars in one day. The first forks showed up. I had no idea who these people were or what terminals they ran, and that was the first time it felt like it wasn't only mine.

Monday 5 Oct: a bug I could never see

@willowite opened #6. On Windows, the ⏺ reply marker falls back to the Segoe UI Emoji font, so Windows Terminal draws a blue emoji and ignores the theme color. The report named the line, the codepoint and the fix: use ●, which prismantis already used for tool rows.

I don't have a Windows box. Claude doesn't either. It was fixed and released the same afternoon, and I couldn't have found it in a year.

Tuesday 6 Oct: the best report, and the first PR

@cesar32az opened #28, the best bug report I've had on anything: versions, OS build, two terminals, settings, steps, --debug output. Copy buttons drew fine and did nothing. Two releases came out of it, including keyboard copy commands, because the report also showed my README was wrong. Then they found the cause on their own side, a CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MOUSE=1 left in ~/.zshrc for months, and apologized for the noise. No apology needed. The keyboard commands are how I copy now.

That evening @Malorn44 sent #38, about 50 lines that let another mod hand prismantis some markdown and get it drawn in the user's theme. I built a renderer for my own replies. Now other mods can draw with it. Merged and shipped the same evening.

Wednesday 7 Oct: the Forks page

In the morning I opened the repo's Forks page, mostly out of curiosity. 6 forks. 3 had real work nobody had sent me: @vrevolverrr had LaTeX math and a fix for table borders, @rooterkyberian had tables that copy into docs as real tables, @AlexeyHRDesign had made the whole thing work in the Claude desktop app.

That is normal. You hit a pain, fix it for yourself, move on. Opening a PR on a stranger's repo costs something, and nobody pays it without a reason.

GitHub has no DMs and their forks had Issues turned off, so I opened one issue per fork on my repo and @mentioned the author. This is the one to @vrevolverrr, #43:

@vrevolverrr love the LaTeX math in your fork (d49e0c9). Typeset formulas via RaTeX in kitty/Ghostty, with a text fallback everywhere else, is exactly right.

Would you open a PR here? Happy to review it fast. If you'd rather not, I can port hooks/latex.ts and the $$ parsing myself and credit you as co-author on the commit.

Specific praise, one ask, a promise I could keep, and an easy out.

Within 10 minutes @AlexeyHRDesign took the out: they're building their own desktop mod, port it with co-author credit please. Then they left a list of what didn't hold up in daily use, including a stray \x08 in a regex where \b was meant. I valued that list as much as the code.

In under 20 minutes @rooterkyberian's PR #47 was up, and @vrevolverrr answered that the border fix was coming first. In the same reply they warned me their LaTeX work runs an external program, which breaks a rule in my own repo. They flagged it before I noticed.

Wednesday, an hour later: two strangers and one bug

Without any invite, @b33eep had opened #46 for the same border bug. Wrapped table rows lost their borders, and in a narrow terminal, as they put it, "that is almost every table". I work in a wide window. I'd never have seen it.

So two people I'd never met had fixed the same bug two different ways, within half an hour of each other. I pointed @vrevolverrr at #46 so they wouldn't do it twice. Then I mostly watched.

@b33eep ran both branches side by side in a terminal without clickable links and found a row where @vrevolverrr's version drew an extra line. @vrevolverrr reproduced it and proposed something better than either fix. @b33eep agreed and asked them to fold their own border idea into #48. It was folded in, re-tested, and @b33eep closed their own PR in favor of the combined one:

thanks for picking this up so quickly and for the co-author credit. Dropping the wrapping for link rows was a better idea than mine, and it was good working through this with you.

About an hour, start to finish. The best review of the week happened between two strangers. I just merged it.

Then @b33eep sent #49, the column-width fix I'd asked for in #41, rebased on top of the merged #48. @vrevolverrr sent #51 for a Serena tool name drawn with "serena" in bold, a 9-line fix for a tool I don't run. I merged it within the hour.

The rest of the week: leading it

My job changed that week. I wrote less code and made more calls.

@rooterkyberian's clipboard PR was solid but touched macOS and Linux at once, so I asked to split it. They had #54 and #55 up the same evening. Both are merged.

@vrevolverrr's LaTeX PR, #50, brought back running an external program, the one thing I'd removed earlier on purpose. I asked for six changes: one switch, off by default, nothing runs unless you turn it on. They sent all six, one commit per point. Merged on 9 Oct. Math now draws as real formulas in kitty and Ghostty, for anyone who opts in.

Most of it was saying yes fast, sometimes saying no kindly, and holding the few rules that keep a mod safe to install. I didn't expect to enjoy that part this much.

What I took from it

Agents made the code cheap. 19 releases in 5 days says more about what code costs now than about me.

The pain is the part I can't generate. Windows fonts, narrow terminals, Serena tool names, the desktop app, pasting tables into docs, math. None of it shows up on my Mac. No prompt would have written issue #6.

So ask the forks. 3 of 6 had fixes nobody told me about. One friendly issue each got me PRs, a list of traps, and a front-row seat to two strangers making each other's code better.

Thanks to @willowite, @cesar32az, @Malorn44, @b33eep, @vrevolverrr, @rooterkyberian and @AlexeyHRDesign. prismantis is better than anything I'd have built alone, and it's the first thing I see every time Claude answers me.

Nahum Litvin is a Technical Lead - DevOps Engineering at Wix.