- https://willmcgugan.github.io/announcing-toad/ (2025-07-23, Announcing Toad - a universal UI for agentic coding in the terminal, by https://willmcgugan.github.io/, @willmcgugan)

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I’m a little salty that neither Anthropic nor Google reached out to me before they released their terminal-based AI coding agents.

You see until recently I was the CEO of Textualize, a startup promoting rich applications for the terminal. Textualize didn’t make it as a company, but I take heart that we built something amazing. There is now a thriving community of folk building TUIs that I am still a part of.

So you will understand why when I finally got round to checking out Claude code and Gemini CLI, I was more interested in the terminal interface than the AI magic it was performing. And I was not impressed. Both projects suffer from jank and other glitches inherent to terminals that Textualize solved years ago.

....

I’m currently taking a year’s sabbatical. When Textualize wrapped up I genuinely thought I was sick of coding, and I would never gain be able to find joy in building things. I’m happy to be wrong about that. I still enjoy coding, and Toad feels like the perfect hobby project for my very particular set of skills. Something I can build while continuing to focus on my physical and mental health (running a startup is taxing).

So I am going to build it.

I am building it.

Here’s a quick video of Toad in its current state: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKsCS54xduo

What I have in mind is a universal front-end for AI in the terminal. This includes both AI chat-bots and agentic coding. The architecture I alluded to earlier is that the front-end built with Python and Textual connects to a back-end subprocess. The back-end handles the interactions with the LLM and performs any agentic coding, while the front-end provides the user interface. The two sides communicate with each other by sending and receiving JSON over stdout and stdin.

...

Toad isn’t quite ready for a public release. It remains a tadpole for now, incubating in a private repository. But you know I’m all about FOSS, and when its ready for a public beta I will release Toad under an Open Source license.

With a bit of luck, this sabbatical needn’t eat in to my retirement fund too much. If it goes well, it may even become my full-time gig.

I will shortly invite a few tech friends and collaborators to the project. These things can’t be the work of a single individual and I am going to need feedback as I work. If you would like to be a part of that, then feel free to reach out. But please note, I would like to prioritize folk in the Open Source community who have potentially related projects.

For everyone else, I will be posting updates regularly here and on my socials (link at the bottom of the page). Expect screenshots, videos, and long form articles. Please be patient—you will be agentic toading before too long.

Looking for markdown streaming? : https://willmcgugan.github.io/streaming-markdown/ (Efficient streaming of Markdown in the terminal)
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