A few months ago, my computer crashed while I had 12 Claude Code sessions running in iTerm. When it didn't restore, I was pissed. So, I decided to build a tool that would let me organize my sessions by project, persist their session IDs, and automatically resume everything when I restarted.

Being a long-time user of [BMad](https://github.com/bmad-code-org/BMAD-METHOD?tab=readme-ov-file) I spun up the analyst agent and started planning out the project. It came out to 12 epics.

* Epic 1 — Working Terminal
* Epic 2 — Multi-Pane Layout
* Epic 3 — Workspace Management
* Epic 4 — Workspace Persistence & Crash Recovery
* Epic 5 — AI Session Auto-Resume
* Epic 6 — Launcher Menu
* Epic 7 — Theming & Customization
* Epic 8 — First-Run & Onboarding
* Epic 9 — Release Pipeline & Auto-Updates
* Epic 10 — Script Adapter SDK & Migration
* Epic 11 — Adapter Discovery, Installation & Onboarding
* Epic 12 — Adapter Authoring & Developer Tools

For months now, I've been using a skill I created called **autonomous-build** (DM me if you want it!). It automates the entire BMad dev pipeline. One orchestrating agent spins up subagents in full automation to do each of the following steps in sequence:

1. Create story
2. Dev story
3. Code review
4. Review fix loop
5. Commit
6. Post-epic retro

It's rarely perfect, but it can plow through epics overnight and while I'm at work. In the evening, I get to see what it's built and spend a few hours refining/fixing and then I ship!

Once I had the initial build of atrium in place, my goal was to never need to open iTerm or Cursor again, so I started adding feature after feature. Each one produced through the BMad process, turned into epics, and completed with autonomous-build. Same post-production refinement process.

Of course, there was tons of BMad quick dev mixed in and a lot of me just prompting Claude Code directly or using /goal or Ultracode (more recently), but every major feature was, at minimum, architecture + epics + autonomous-build.

**At this point I was using atrium to build atrium.**

I haven't touched another IDE in a long time.

The unique advantage atrium has given me in this process is a product of all of the features it has. I won't enumerate all of em here. Check out [getatrium.dev](http://getatrium.dev) or ask me in the comments if you're interested.

Just to name a few of the high-level unlocks:

* I can now have and hold planning sessions across 10, 15, or more features at a time without issue. Sometimes brainstorming sessions that span days or weeks.
* I can work across several other projects simultaneously without slowing down on any of em and without losing visibility into any of them.
* Agent to agent messaging is first-class in atrium and I get Claude to interact with Codex on a regular basis to solve complex problems or get a different perspective.
* The in app browser, task tracking, and painless worktree management make it effortless to execute multiple features at a time.

Yeh, I'm totally shilling atrium here (sue me... I built it), but I do want to emphasize how important BMad was to the process. Vibe-coding just can't do this. There are features that took crazy feats, like embedding CEF (Chromium) into a Tauri app or managing a pool of alacritty PTY sessions to drive our terminals.

None of that happens without thorough planning & design.

Don't be fooled by Fable's crazy one-shots you're seeing all over X. That stuff works because it's patterned off stuff already in the wild. The spec is already there.

If you want to build something genuinely new, spec-driven development is the way to go and there's nothing better than BMad.

How I shipped 68 epics in under 3 months to build atrium - AMA