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Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

willmcgugan.github.io

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Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#21

Post by lemming »

willm wrote: post #4

Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.

Toad looks really nice, I will definitely try it out. I have some ACP questions if you don't mind.

First, from my reading of the ACP doc, one thing that seems pretty janky is if the ACP client wants to expose a tool to the agent, e.g. if Toad wanted to add the ability for the agent to display pretty diffs. In the doc they recommend stdio to the ACP server, then stdio to an MCP server, and then some out of band network request back to the ACP client. Have you thought about this, or found a better solution working on Toad?

Similarly, it would be useful to be able to expose a tool which runs a subagent using ACP using a different agent, e.g. if I'm using Claude for coding but I'd like to invoke codex for code review. Have you thought about doing anything like this? Is it feasible over the protocol?

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#22

Post by mark_undoio »

Very excited to see this come out - though coding agents are impressive their UIs are a bit of a mixed bag.

Textual offers incredibly impressive terminal experiences so I'm very much looking forward to this.

I wonder how much agentic magic it'll be able to include though - Claude Code often seems like a lot of its intelligence comes from the scaffolding, not just the LLM. I'm excited to see!

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#23

Post by willm »

mark_undoio wrote: post #22

Very excited to see this come out - though coding agents are impressive their UIs are a bit of a mixed bag. Textual offers incredibly impressive terminal experiences so I'm very much looking forward to this. I wonder how much agentic magic it'll be able to include though - Claude Code often seems like a lot of its intelligence comes from the scaffolding, not just the LLM. I'm excited to see!

Hope you like it. It is still Claude Code doing the work. Toad talks to the agent, and is the agent that works with the LLM. So the results should be identical to the native CLI.

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#24

Post by Cannabat »

willm wrote: post #4

Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.

Hi Will,

I was about to try opencode after using claude code for quite a while.

I think understand the fundamental difference in how they work (acp against existing agentic loops with toad vs a single agentic loop for all models with opencode) but I’m curious why we might want toad over something like opencode, which lets me use any model under the sun.

I suppose toad gets to use the highly specialized agentic loops for each cli. And has a nicer (? opencode is pretty slick from my brief usage…).

Curious to hear about why you chose to built this way and what advantages you see.

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#25

Post by willm »

Cannabat wrote: post #24
willm wrote: post #4

Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.

Hi Will, I was about to try opencode after using claude code for quite a while. I think understand the fundamental difference in how they work (acp against existing agentic loops with toad vs a single agentic loop for all models with opencode) but I’m curious why we might want toad over something like opencode, which lets me use any model under the sun. I suppose toad gets to use the highly specialized agentic loops…

That’s pretty much it. You can bring your own agent. Including OpenCode by the way. I doubt they will mind as they still get paid for the tokens.

You get a nice UI that is only going to get better as time goes on.

It’s far better model to separate the agent from the UI. The current situation is like building a browser for a single website.

Re: Toad is a unified experience for AI in the terminal

#26

Post by willm »

lemming wrote: post #21
willm wrote: post #4

Hi. Will McGugan here. I built Toad. Ask me anything.

Toad looks really nice, I will definitely try it out. I have some ACP questions if you don't mind. First, from my reading of the ACP doc, one thing that seems pretty janky is if the ACP client wants to expose a tool to the agent, e.g. if Toad wanted to add the ability for the agent to display pretty diffs. In the doc they recommend stdio to the ACP server, then stdio to an MCP server, and then some out of band networ…

I don’t follow your first question. Toad already displays pretty diffs. MCP works in the same way as the native CLI.

One of the advantages of Toad is that it is vendor agnostic. In the future Toad will be able to run sub agents, and allocate any agent to any job. Still to figure out the UX for that.

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