The office-hours queue is a list of terminal URLs

Wednesday, 4 PM, remote office hours. Twelve students in the queue. Each entry is one line: a name and their terminal URL with ?terminal_id=1.

The TA opens the first one with &readonly=true. She sees the student's actual screen: the segfault, the file they were editing, the command they ran three times. No "can you share your screen," no waiting for the Zoom prompt to clear. Thirty seconds in, she drops the readonly flag, opens the same URL again, and types into the same session. The student watches the fix happen in their own shell, with their own prompt.

Next student. Next URL.

Twelve students in forty minutes, because nobody spent five of them setting up a screen share. Help starts in the student's shell, not in a description of it.

Help starts in the student's shell, not in a description of it.