Your AI agents are quietly cooking your MacBook. Here's the fix.

It's 11am. You've got six agent sessions going — one writing tests, one chewing through a refactor, a couple parked while you think, two more you forgot about in other tabs. The fans never even spin — modern Macs are dead silent — but the aluminum under your wrists is hot as a flat iron, it stings to the touch, and the battery that read 100% at breakfast is somehow at 43%.

None of those agents are even doing much right now. So why is the laptop on fire?

The thing nobody tells you about agent terminals

AI coding agents run as terminal apps, and terminal apps redraw the screen on a clock — a spinner here, an elapsed timer there, a shimmer somewhere. That clock keeps ticking even when the agent is just sitting at a prompt waiting for you. Multiply it by a handful of tabs and you've got a pile of processes each burning a few percent of CPU to animate… nothing.

A normal terminal doesn't care. It's a passive window: it'll happily host ten idle agents and let every one of them cook. The terminal isn't the problem people think about — but it's exactly where the problem can be fixed.

Breeze spends nothing when nothing's happening

Breeze is a full Mac terminal — tabs, splits, scrollback, truecolor — built for one job above all: running AI agents without melting your laptop. It doesn't just host the agent, it manages it:

• Pauses idle agents. An agent waiting for you gets quietly suspended, then woken the instant you type — so "waiting" actually costs nothing.
• Freezes the tabs you're not looking at. Switch away and that session drops to zero until you come back.
• Cleans up the mess. Agents leave behind helper processes (language servers and friends); Breeze reaps the stale ones.
• Stays tiny. A ~4 MB native app drawn on the CPU — no GPU, no Electron — that keeps old scrollback on disk instead of in memory.

The other terminals are great. They're also enormous.

This isn't a knock on the competition — quite the opposite. Ghostty is genuinely brilliant: a GPU renderer, a SIMD-optimized parser, separate read/write/render threads per terminal, an embeddable core library, cross-platform all the way down to WebAssembly. It's mostly Zig with Swift and C and C++ mixed in, ~16,000 commits of careful work. iTerm2 is its own universe — hundreds of thousands of lines, a Python scripting API, a browser plugin, profiles, triggers, tmux integration.

They win on speed and features, and they should. But none of that helps you at hour three with six agents running. Breeze makes the opposite bet: a few thousand lines of Rust, a tight dependency list, no GPU, sensible defaults. It's small precisely so it can get out of the way and let your agents have the battery.

Who it's for

If you live in AI agents all day on a Mac and you're tired of warm wrists and a dead battery by lunch, Breeze is for you. If you want Lua scripting, background images, and fifty config knobs — that's a different (excellent) tool, and you should use it.