Story

Hi HN,

Up to the middle of 2025, I was the CEO/CTO of a startup called Textualize. Somehow I had managed to land seed funding for my Python libraries for fancy terminal output. We wrapped up after three years because the funding ran dry.

I honestly thought I was sick of coding at that point. But it turns out I was sick of the stress and working all hours. A few weeks rest was all I needed.

It was about that time that coding agents exploded, and I could no longer ignore them. I wasn't impressed with the UI these tools offered. Having worked in the terminal for a few years, I knew you could get a better user experience. And so this project was born.

I had planned to create some kind of layer between the agent's SDK and the front-end. Fortunately after I started building this, Zed Industries released Agent Client Protocol (https://agentclientprotocol.com/). Which was precisely what I needed.

I've just released the code (It was a private repo for a while). Toad (a play on Textual Code) can run a large number of AI agents, which a nicer terminal UI.

Think of it as a "bring your own agent" coding CLI. Use whatever agent you want. I'm not trying to sell you tokens.

Ask me anything. I'll be hanging around for a while, if this post takes off.