Building a Real-Time Terminal Messenger on LinkedIn's Private APIs with Bun, Ink, and a Git-Backed Message Store

Allman is a two-layer system for LinkedIn messaging from the terminal: a CLI that syncs, sends, and streams LinkedIn messages into a git-versioned file store, and a TUI that renders it as a full two-pane Ink/React terminal messenger with live updates, auto-backfill, and real-time presence.

The demo shows the TUI in action — navigating conversations, composing replies, watching the status bar update as messages stream in over LinkedIn’s SSE channel, and kicking off a sync that backfills an entire conversation history while showing live progress counts. Under the hood, the TUI never touches the network directly. Every write — sends, syncs, searches — shells out to the lilac binary, which is embedded inside the compiled TUI executable as a bundled asset. Every read — conversation list, message thread, slug lookup — goes straight to JSONL files on disk, so navigation is instant with zero subprocess overhead per keystroke.

The key learning or takeaway is that private APIs, even when obfuscated, are easily reverse-engineered by coding harnesses. Claude Opus 4.6 processed the compiled LinkedIn binary overnight, completely autonomously.