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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

#61

Post by willm »

anentropic wrote: post #43
willm wrote: post #4

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

Just installed it... How are new agents added? Do you have to write a dedicated plugin for each one? Or there's some kind of discovery mechanism? (I was looking for Copilot, but I guess that will depend on https://github.com/github/copilot-cli/issues/222 ?)

It’s stored statically in the Codebase. In the future, I suspect there will be enough compatible agents that there might be a web service to search them.

I think they are working in the Copilot ACP layer. Doubt it will take long.

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

#65

Post by CGamesPlay »

willm wrote: post #56
CGamesPlay wrote: post #49

I strongly resonate with the problem statement, but this implementation was very far off the mark for me. Every interaction feels bad. I fired it up, and the first thing I notice is that the arrow keys don't work. I can't select Claude Code. Oh, apparently it's in a different control, so I have to press Tab, and then the arrow keys work. Wow, this list of buttons has a slow scrolling animation when navigating it. Can…

[flagged]

> Pretty sure you are a troll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912796

> If you don't like the keyboard control, you could always just use your mouse to click stuff. > 100x20 characters IIRC > Which is displayed prominently in the footer. > I don't think you were interested in fixing it, as you would have mentioned an error message.

No, the error message was perfectly clear! That's how I knew the solution. "Agent returned a failure code: 127 - /bin/sh: claude-code-acp: command not found" The solution is to run via npx.

> It does work for multi-word commands. But if your command contains a space you will need to wrap it in quotes. 

    $ toad run "npx @zed-industries/claude-code-acp"
    Not a directory: npx @zed-industries/claude-code-acp
> I imagine you don't work in the terminal much? Anyways, go take your sabbatical, relax, you need it. I do genuinely want a better CLI interface for my coding agents and what you said elsewhere that the landscape is "like building a browser for a single website" is very true. Hopefully you come back with fresh eyes and can make a compelling offering in this space.

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

#66

Post by dc_giant »

willm wrote: post #59
dc_giant wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t know that. Good reason then of course. But I do notice these sort of differences. Codex feels way better than Claude code to me for example. I tried Toad and to me it feels ridiculously slow and laggy. Switching between input and output (ALT+up/down) for example just lags, I can notice the transition. The whole UI lags. It's no wonder, it's python. Simply the wrong language for this, sorry.

It is quite literally instantaneous on my 5 year old laptop. Whatever you are seeing isn't due to the choice of Python.

Maybe it's something on my setup then. I notice some delay even though it's by no means huge but noticable. For me these things add up, another example is pane resizing in tmux. I like things snappy, but it's kind of an OCD thing I guess.

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

#68

Post by joshribakoff »

fatliverfreddy wrote: post #50

This looks fantastic! Check out vibecommander - it’s a young tool in this space with a different take that wraps around CLI coding assistants with IDE-style file and git panels that compliment the experience by letting the human do the code review part of the task seamlessly. Will add Toad support ASAP, I’m sure they’ll be great together. https://github.com/AvitalTamir/vibecommander

You could also consider checking out vim, which solved this 50yrs ago ;) in all seriousness, you have terminals, splits, lazygit… so to me, it seems like this is a case of “not invented here”

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

#69

Post by willm »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #65
willm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Pretty sure you are a troll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912796 > If you don't like the keyboard control, you could always just use your mouse to click stuff. > 100x20 characters IIRC > Which is displayed prominently in the footer. > I don't think you were interested in fixing it, as you would have mentioned an error message. No, the error message was perfectly clear! That's how I knew the solution. "Agen…

Not saying there isn't room for improvement. This is the first release, and work is ongoing. But I can't predict everyone's assumptions. Everyone brings their own experiences to the table, and in 6 months of testing nobody has made assumptions you just did.

For instance, "toad run" takes a path to a directory and not a command (check the usage). You've made an incorrect assumption about how that works, based on previous assumptions on how the UI works.

I would be like to understand why you made the assumptions you did, and make changes based on your feedback. But you've chosen to be combative, for reasons known only to yourself.

For the record, I apologize for the "Mr cranky pants" quip. If you do want to improve this software, join the Discord. Let's keep it civil. Merry Xmas.

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

#70

Post by saberience »

joshribakoff wrote: post #68
fatliverfreddy wrote: post #50

This looks fantastic! Check out vibecommander - it’s a young tool in this space with a different take that wraps around CLI coding assistants with IDE-style file and git panels that compliment the experience by letting the human do the code review part of the task seamlessly. Will add Toad support ASAP, I’m sure they’ll be great together. https://github.com/AvitalTamir/vibecommander

You could also consider checking out vim, which solved this 50yrs ago ;) in all seriousness, you have terminals, splits, lazygit… so to me, it seems like this is a case of “not invented here”

Vim has a terrible user experience though. There's a reason everyone stopped using it as soon as they possibly could and moved to other text editors. Now the only vim users are the 60 year old+ greybeards who try to convince everyone they're such morons for not using it.

Stop trying to convince people to use vim, it sucks, it's got a terrible ux, it's not intuitive, it's overly complicated, hard to learn, arcane, and looks like ass.

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