The TUI felt hung because banger tui blocked on ensureDaemon before Bubble Tea started, then treated the initial vm and image fetch as one combined loading gate.
Start the program first, move daemon bootstrap into staged TUI commands, render the full layout with inline loading placeholders, and split vm list and image list startup so VMs can appear before images finish loading. Also record per-stage timings so the slow step is visible in the status line instead of hidden behind a generic loading state.
Verified with go test ./internal/cli, go test ./..., and make build.
VM create and vm set accepted zero or negative CPU and memory values, which either got stored directly or silently fell back to defaults and only surfaced as failures later. This tightens validation so bad settings are rejected at the user boundary and again in the daemon before any VM record is persisted.
Change vm.create CPU and memory request fields to optional pointers so omitted values still mean defaults, while explicit non-positive values can be distinguished and rejected. Update Cobra create/set parsing, keep the TUI aligned with the new API shape, and add regression tests for CLI parsing, daemon-side validation, and the create-defaults path.
Validation: go test ./... and make build. Left my-rootfs.ext4 untracked.
Replace the shell-only user workflow with `banger` and `bangerd`: Cobra commands, XDG/SQLite-backed state, managed VM and image lifecycle, and a Bubble Tea TUI for browsing and operating VMs.\n\nKeep Firecracker orchestration behind the daemon so VM specs become persistent objects, and add repo entrypoints for building, installing, and documenting the new flow while still delegating rootfs customization to the existing shell tooling.\n\nHarden the control plane around real usage by reclaiming Firecracker API sockets for the user, restarting stale daemons after rebuilds, and returning the correct `vm.create` payload so the CLI and TUI creation flow work reliably.\n\nValidation: `go test ./...`, `make build`, and a host-side smoke test with `./banger vm create --name codex-smoke`.
