How to get there
On the SSH Connections screen, the header of a group with two or more hosts gains the “Connect all N” button. It opens every host in the group as vertical panes of a single workspace — vertical because the point is comparing the outputs. From there: A pane that dies drops out of the count on its own. If one is left, the bar disappears.The bar
Off, it is discreet: a Broadcast toggle and nothing else. On, it turns entirely amber and shows “Broadcast: N hosts”. That is deliberate — you need to know, without looking, that the next keystroke goes to more than one machine.The chips
The broadcast’s “group” is not the Host Group. The group only seeded the list; the target is a set of chips, one per host, each clickable to include or exclude. There is “all” and “none” next to them.- Default: all the tab’s live SSH panes.
- An unselected chip is dimmed — the difference is visible from across the room.
- Each chip carries the host’s color dot. It’s the color you registered.
The red gate
Here is the part that matters. Keystrokes pass through freely. Typing doesn’t execute anything, so there is nothing to block — what you type shows up in the N prompts, and that’s it. On Enter, the core decides. Before the fan-out, it classifies the line with the same classifier as the agent’s approval gate — the same list, not a copy that drifts over time. The decision lives in the core, not in the interface. The webview cannot fire a red command at N machines even if it wanted to.Why yellow doesn’t ask
Because asking on yellow would make the feature unbearable — and, worse, would teach you to click without reading. A gate that fires all the time becomes a reflex. And the day the real red shows up, you will have been trained to hit “yes” before finishing the sentence. One dialog you read is worth more than ten you dismiss. Sosystemctl restart nginx takes nginx down on all eight hosts without ceremony. It’s yellow, it’s your responsibility, and TYBA doesn’t pretend otherwise. See risk classification for what falls in each band.
A single-host session doesn’t go through the gate. If you have just one SSH pane,
sudo rm -rf goes out immediately, as it would in any terminal.That is not an inconsistency: the danger broadcast addresses is the fan-out — the same damage on N machines at once, with no chance to react after the first.What the classified line is
The line the core classifies is reconstructed from what you typed in that burst. Arrow keys,Tab, shell history — those don’t pass through it.
In practice: a command pulled from history with ↑ is not what the gate sees. What executes is still what’s at the prompt.
When something fails
A failure on one target doesn’t go quiet. If the keystroke reached 2 of 3 hosts, the error is aggregated and reported — the app doesn’t say “ok” and leave you to find out too late that the burst wasn’t complete.What broadcast is not
See also
Hosts and groups
Where the group that becomes “Connect all N” is born.
Risk classification
The classifier is the same. It’s worth knowing what’s red.
Agent over SSH
What the broadcast gate doesn’t cover.
Shortcuts
Broadcast has no shortcut. Everything else does.