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

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

#11

Post by joshribakoff »

cossatot wrote: post #7
mccoyb wrote: post #3

Something something medical researcher reinvents calculus. In 2026: frontend web developer reinvents tmux. Guys, please do us the service of pre-filtering your crack token dreams by investigating the tool stack which is already available in the terminal ... or at least give us the courtesy of explaining why your vibecoded Greenspun's 10th something is a significant leg up on what already exists, and perhaps has exist…

Maybe, just maybe, this is of obvious utility to the many people who have needs that are not yours? I very regularly need to interact with my work through a python interpreter. My work is scientific programming. So the variables might be arrays with millions of elements. In order to debug, optimize, verify, or improve in any way my work, I cannot rely on any other methods than interacting with the code as it's being…

> I'm not going to dump tens of GB of stuff to a log file

In the same vein as the parent comment, the curiosity is why you would vibe code a solution instead of reaching for grep.

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

#13

Post by joshribakoff »

dcchuck wrote: post #6
mccoyb wrote: post #3

Something something medical researcher reinvents calculus. In 2026: frontend web developer reinvents tmux. Guys, please do us the service of pre-filtering your crack token dreams by investigating the tool stack which is already available in the terminal ... or at least give us the courtesy of explaining why your vibecoded Greenspun's 10th something is a significant leg up on what already exists, and perhaps has exist…

I agree. We skipped CLIs and went all the way to TUIs because TUIs are "easy to make now"? Or maybe because claude/codex? But in practice you are padding token counts of agents reading streams of TUIs instead of leveraging standard unix pipes that have been around from day 1. TLDR - your agent wants a CLI anyway. Disclaimer: still a cool project and thank you to the author for sharing.

The TUI makes more sense to humans who don’t understand the difference between a human and a machine.

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

#14

Post by daveguy »

mccoyb wrote: post #9
cossatot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, just maybe, this is of obvious utility to the many people who have needs that are not yours? I very regularly need to interact with my work through a python interpreter. My work is scientific programming. So the variables might be arrays with millions of elements. In order to debug, optimize, verify, or improve in any way my work, I cannot rely on any other methods than interacting with the code as it's being…

See related sibling: the use cases are compelling! My complaint is that tmux handles them perfectly. Exactly the claim that OP is making with their software - is served by robust 18 year old software. In 2026, it costs nearly nothing to thoroughly and autonomously investigate related software — so yes I am going to be purposefully abrasive about it.

And if you want to interact with tmux from within the python interpreter there is a very good library available, libtmux:

https://github.com/tmux-python/libtmux

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

#16

Post by jauntywundrkind »

wild_egg wrote: post #4

I've had my agents using tmux for these use cases for a couple years now. What does TUI-use offer on top?

I've barely been using it lately, mostly leaving it disabled. But the tmux-mcp is pretty solid. https://github.com/nickgnd/tmux-mcp

I wish I was keeping better track of them all but there's a bunch of neat tmux based multi-agent systems. Agent of Empires for example has a ton of code around reading session data out of the various terminal uis. https://github.com/njbrake/agent-of-empires

Ideally imo tui apps also would have accessibility APIs. The structured view of those APIs feels like it would be nice to have. And it would mean that an agent could just use accessibility and hit both gui and tui. For example voxcode recent submission does this on mac for understanding what file is open/line numbers. https://github.com/jensneuse/voxcode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688582

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

#18

Post by dcre »

mccoyb wrote: post #3

Something something medical researcher reinvents calculus. In 2026: frontend web developer reinvents tmux. Guys, please do us the service of pre-filtering your crack token dreams by investigating the tool stack which is already available in the terminal ... or at least give us the courtesy of explaining why your vibecoded Greenspun's 10th something is a significant leg up on what already exists, and perhaps has exist…

Right, agents can just use tmux send-keys. Here's a skill I wrote to have Claude debug plugin code in the Helix editor's experimental plugin system. As usual, the skill is barely necessary, it just saves it some time getting the commands right and tells it where some useful reference material is.

https://github.com/david-crespo/dotfiles/blob/main/claude/sk...

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

#19

Post by arjie »

cossatot wrote: post #7
mccoyb wrote: post #3

Something something medical researcher reinvents calculus. In 2026: frontend web developer reinvents tmux. Guys, please do us the service of pre-filtering your crack token dreams by investigating the tool stack which is already available in the terminal ... or at least give us the courtesy of explaining why your vibecoded Greenspun's 10th something is a significant leg up on what already exists, and perhaps has exist…

Maybe, just maybe, this is of obvious utility to the many people who have needs that are not yours? I very regularly need to interact with my work through a python interpreter. My work is scientific programming. So the variables might be arrays with millions of elements. In order to debug, optimize, verify, or improve in any way my work, I cannot rely on any other methods than interacting with the code as it's being…

What I do is have a quick command that spins up a worktree on a repo with my ghostty splits as I like them and the tmux named the worktree. I then tell the Claude code about the tmux when it needs to look. It’s pretty good at natively handling the tmux interactions.

Ideally Ghostty would offer primitives to launch splits but c’est la vie. Apple automation it is.

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

#20

Post by SatvikBeri »

cossatot wrote: post #7
mccoyb wrote: post #3

Something something medical researcher reinvents calculus. In 2026: frontend web developer reinvents tmux. Guys, please do us the service of pre-filtering your crack token dreams by investigating the tool stack which is already available in the terminal ... or at least give us the courtesy of explaining why your vibecoded Greenspun's 10th something is a significant leg up on what already exists, and perhaps has exist…

Maybe, just maybe, this is of obvious utility to the many people who have needs that are not yours? I very regularly need to interact with my work through a python interpreter. My work is scientific programming. So the variables might be arrays with millions of elements. In order to debug, optimize, verify, or improve in any way my work, I cannot rely on any other methods than interacting with the code as it's being…

Are you aware that you can use tmux (or zellij, etc.), spin up the interpreter in a tmux session, and then the LLM can interact with it perfectly normally by using send-keys? And that this works quite well, because LLMs are trained on it? You just need to tell the LLM "I have ipython open in a tmux session named pythonrepl"

This is exactly how I do most of my data analysis work in Julia.

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