Show HN: TUI-use: Let AI agents control interactive terminal programs

Finally Claude Code can now control Claude Code

I could make agents use delve (a go lang debugger) interactively, and it worked quite well specially when models weren't as good as they are now, they could choose where to put the breakpoint and inspect variables, I found that was the only way to unlock some situations when they insisted in that "it must be working", and it wasn't, I found that giving them the empirical tools to check for themselves was the only way to unstuck them.

Another use was for them to read the logs out of your development web server ( typical npm run dev, go run .)

I could do this with tmux send-keys and tmux capture-pane, you just need to organise the session, panes and windows and tell the agent where is what.

That was my first agent to tool communication experience, and it was cool.

After that I experimented with a agent to agent communication, and I would prompt to claude "after you finish ask @alex to review your code". In the CLAUDE.md file i'd explain that to talk to @alex you need to send the message using tmux send-keys to his tmux session, and to codex I'd say "when you received a review request from @claudia do .. such and such, and when you finish write her back the result of it" I added one more agent to coordinate a todo list, and send next tasks.

After that I got a bit carried away and wrote some code to organise things in matrix chat rooms, (because the mobile app just works with your server) and I was fascinated that they seem to be collaborating quite well (to some extend), but it didn't scale.

I abandoned the "project" because after all I found agents were getting better and better and implementing internal todo tasks, subagents ...etc plus some other tmux orchestrations tools appeared every other day.

I got fatigued of some many new ai things coming up, that and the end, I went back to just use iTerm, split panes, and manually coordinate things. Tabs for projects, panes for agents, no more than 2 agents per project ( max 3 for a side non conflicting task ) I think that is also what cognitively does not tire me.

My project name was cool though, tamex, as in tame tmux agents :)

And to comment on the submission, I think the idea has potential, I might give it a try, the key is to have low friction and require low cognitive load from the end user. I think that's why skills after all are the thing that is going to stick the most.

Does it work on any TUI?

The problem is, they'll find there is typically already a good solution to their problem, and then they'll have nothing to write about.