1. How has it been working with ACP? Is it anywhere near feature parity with Claude code’s native interface?
2. I see your repo is written in Python which is interesting to me for a responsive TUI. Is it snappy and performant and if so what gave you done to make it feel native? And why did you choose Python?
Python is more than capable of running a TUI. It is just text manipulation after all. Toad uses Textual, which is currently the best TUI library around. I may be biased saying that as I built it...
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?
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.
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.
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.
It literally is using Claude under the hood. Should be no different than Claude’s own CLI.
It worked perfectly and looked splendid doing so.
Excited to dig in further.
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!
_whiteCaps_•1d ago
mark_l_watson•20h ago