Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 196 - Ditch the TUI

Source: https://x.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1988825875127607363 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 196: Ditch the TUI Upgrade #1 of 10: "Replace janky fake ter... Upload date: 20251113 Transcription model: gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize Generated at: 2026-06-01T03:26:14Z

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[00:00] Christopher David: They say new products should be a 10x improvement over what came before.

[00:04] Christopher David: So what does a 10x improvement over Claude code,

[00:07] Christopher David: over codex look like,

[00:09] Christopher David: over cursor look like?

[00:10] Christopher David: Here's 10 areas that we think make sense.

[00:13] Christopher David: Let's go through each of them.

[00:15] Christopher David: Ditch the TUI.

[00:16] Christopher David: Okay,

[00:16] Christopher David: these janky, fake terminals that everyone is just copying off of Claude Code because that's what they did.

[00:21] Christopher David: Where you're like pretending you're a developer and cool in the terminal where there's no reason to be in the terminal because you're not using like actual terminal commands.

[00:30] Christopher David: There's nothing about the TUI that you couldn't also do from a desktop app.

[00:33] Christopher David: Give me a sidebar.

[00:35] Christopher David: Get rid of this screen flicker. I can't copy paste properly. All this stuff that's already been...

[00:39] Christopher David: been solved by like actual good UI give me a chat GPT style desktop app with like history on the side some widgets down here if I want to manage long-running agents like why does that not exist keep it simple number two go mobile okay I want to have a desktop app that syncs to my mobile phone so

[01:06] Christopher David: Give me the exact same flow,

[01:07] Christopher David: the same UI components,

[01:09] Christopher David: the same controls.

[01:10] Christopher David: If I'm at home doing my usual workflow,

[01:13] Christopher David: let me have the desktop app.

[01:15] Christopher David: But if I want to go to the store,

[01:17] Christopher David: let me be able to do all of the same stuff from my mobile phone.

[01:20] Christopher David: Okay,

[01:20] Christopher David: we figured out how to do that. See the previous episodes.

[01:24] Christopher David: Some people say like, oh use,

[01:26] Christopher David: you know, you know, what about open AI's codex? You can use it on the web. You can.

[01:31] Christopher David: Have you tried it? Codex. Watch this.

[01:34] Christopher David: Oh, get started.

[01:36] Christopher David: Codex web.

[01:37] Christopher David: takes you to the mobile app you can't use it from the mobile app there's no codex option here so are these 500 billion dollar companies or what no they need a startup i guess to make an actual freaking app let's do that code overnight um i want to be able to let stuff run overnight and not in this hilarious horrible way that you have to do with codex oh yeah it fixes thousands of overnight how do you actually do that right now you have to just queue up continue continue continue continue like and it's it's so dumb

[02:07] Christopher David: So yeah, but hey,

[02:08] Christopher David: this is an idea for a new feature: scheduled prompts.

[02:11] Christopher David: In three hours do this, in four hours do this, in six hours after limit resets do this.

[02:16] Christopher David: Or make it even more intelligent,

[02:17] Christopher David: like give the agents a little bit of discretion about like checking to see what's been done or what's not.

[02:22] Christopher David: to advance your kind of higher level objective of adding more tests or whatever.

[02:26] Christopher David: I did like a basic version of this last night. You can see here I like set up an orchestration to run overnight.

[02:31] Christopher David: It made like a few.

[02:32] Christopher David: It's basically like a glorified cron with different kind of like sub agents.

[02:36] Christopher David: It's kind of orchestrating different codecs things.

[02:38] Christopher David: You can read the audit of what went well and not with that.

[02:41] Christopher David: But I'm going to iterate on this and in a very soon version we'll have this out. Okay?

[02:46] Christopher David: CLI agents is sub-agents. You know how Claude will delegate to a sub-agent and it'll kind of have its own context window when it issues a task, that's what it's doing.

[02:56] Christopher David: Why can't I just have my main open agents chat delegate to codex, delegate to cloud code in the context of a single conversation with all of that context available to agents who want it. So here is a tool call that my Apple Foundation

[03:12] Christopher David: model chat model which is basically a little glorified router that we built with a few basic tool calls where it can delegate to codecs

[03:20] Christopher David: it's going to delegate to called code it can have them like talk with each other whole lot of design space to explore there

[03:26] Christopher David: history and memory like yeah just give me the sidebar with the chat so i can actually see like what's already happened and like let me easily reference past chats like in this other chat or let it retrieve it itself there should be a local sqlite database where it's able to be like oh yeah like you know three days ago we discussed this i saw that we came to this conclusion right now all of the like claude code and codex conversations are just in these like giant json blobs not optimized for discovery at all

[03:50] Christopher David: hazard-free interrupt all the debate and like hoops you have to jump through to get mcp working people oh yeah no yeah so the tool registry definitions are too long so now you need to like create an api from it but then you need to like create a script that'll consume that or rewrite like stop it stop stop making me think in those terms like if you're in a app you should be able to like easily pull in integrations

[04:16] Christopher David: i'll figure all this shit out but like make it available to other people that they don't have to like go through all these insane hoops um embrace open source the the leader here in my view on the app side for coding agents is open code they've built a massive community of contributors they've got like very healthy community of people actually building like props to codex for being open source i think that's cool but like embracing it and like having a whole bunch of people contribute and add to it is great um i just want to do that kind of thing but for our more opinionated

[04:45] Christopher David: agent uh agentic flow here with open agents okay local swarm and cloud inference if i've got a bunch of compute

[04:52] Christopher David: On my computer, if I've got stuff that my foundation models like M2 chip is able to do for summarization,

[04:59] Christopher David: for updating title summaries, like use your local compute where it's needed.

[05:04] Christopher David: Let's say that there's a whole bunch of other people that have free compute.

[05:08] Christopher David: Hey,

[05:08] Christopher David: maybe I'm able to like pay them and like use that swarm compute more on that in a second.

[05:13] Christopher David: And then cloud,

[05:14] Christopher David: like, yeah, obviously the we're steering codex and cloud code,

[05:18] Christopher David: which are cloud based agents.

[05:19] Christopher David: agents but like maybe i do want to like go hit grok groq for they've got let's say they put kimmy's new thinking model up with that and i want to like use that like there should be a mix of inference possibilities uh people should be able to like mix and match based on their their cost preferences or have that done automatically after setting some preferences um compute fracking okay

[05:41] Christopher David: You, you have compute available to you that you are not doing anything with.

[05:48] Christopher David: Why are you not doing anything with it?

[05:50] Christopher David: Okay.

[05:51] Christopher David: You've got an M2 chip that's just sitting there.

[05:53] Christopher David: Are you using that compute right now to run agents?

[05:56] Christopher David: No.

[05:56] Christopher David: Then you're wasting electricity.

[05:58] Christopher David: Well, there just hasn't been any software for you to run that on your computer was just able to like have agents run around the clock or if you don't have any economically sensible use cases.

[06:08] Christopher David: Why can't you sell that to your neighbor who will pay you a tiny fraction of a dollar,

[06:13] Christopher David: tiny fraction of a Bitcoin,

[06:14] Christopher David: to use your compute?

[06:16] Christopher David: See episode,

[06:17] Christopher David: I don't know, 140, we did some compute marketplace stuff. We're going to be folding that back into this.

[06:23] Christopher David: Sam Altman and all these people talking about,

[06:24] Christopher David: oh, we're bottlenecked by compute.

[06:25] Christopher David: Okay,

[06:26] Christopher David: you've got every freaking device,

[06:29] Christopher David: you know, the 2 billion Apple devices, what percentage of those are iOS 16 and can now run, or 26 and can now run the.

[06:39] Christopher David: On device foundation models,

[06:40] Christopher David: where is it, see our recent tweets about,

[06:43] Christopher David: yeah, yeah, so what percentage of these global AI workloads are going to run on Apple Silicon?

[06:48] Christopher David: The big labs are not going to innovate in this direction because they are now like in the NVIDIA, drinking the NVIDIA Kool-Aid, but we have no such limitations.

[06:59] Christopher David: So just remember,

[07:00] Christopher David: compute fracking.

[07:01] Christopher David: You heard it here first.

[07:03] Christopher David: Revenue sharing.

[07:03] Christopher David: Now, to anyone who's like,

[07:04] Christopher David: Chris,

[07:05] Christopher David: why are you spilling all the juice here,

[07:07] Christopher David: the sauce?

[07:08] Christopher David: You're giving it all away,

[07:09] Christopher David: the alpha.

[07:09] Christopher David: You're just leaking it out here.

[07:11] Christopher David: No, no, no.

[07:11] Christopher David: We're here to build network effect.

[07:13] Christopher David: So we're going to be open source.

[07:14] Christopher David: We're going to be building in public.

[07:16] Christopher David: We're going to monetize this.

[07:18] Christopher David: And how we're going to be building the biggest network is because we're going to be getting developers paid.

[07:25] Christopher David: By building an actual marketplace.

[07:27] Christopher David: Hey,

[07:27] Christopher David: developer,

[07:27] Christopher David: and this is going to solve so many of the coordination problems around why MCPs suck in implementation because no one has an actual financial incentive to maintain them or make them good.

[07:35] Christopher David: Hey, developers,

[07:36] Christopher David: you wrote an agent plug-in.

[07:39] Christopher David: Would you like to put that in a registry and get paid a tiny fraction of a cent every time someone uses it?

[07:46] Christopher David: How do you do that?

[07:47] Christopher David: Built-in Bitcoin wallet.

[07:48] Christopher David: Oh, have you built this already?

[07:50] Christopher David: We built this already.

[07:51] Christopher David: That's the benefit of having been around for two years and on episode 190.

[07:54] Christopher David: We've built all of this stuff in prototype form and now we're just mushing it into a single product now that we've got the agentic coding go-to-market piece figured out.

[08:03] Christopher David: Okay, what would you add to this list?

[08:06] Christopher David: Please tell us.

[08:07] Christopher David: We are aiming to get at least basic versions of every one of these 10 upgrades.

[08:12] Christopher David: in place by the end of this year,

[08:14] Christopher David: six weeks from now,

[08:17] Christopher David: what would you add to it?

[08:19] Christopher David: See you soon.

[08:20] Christopher David: How can open agents help me? Well,

[08:22] Christopher David: Claude, you can tell them about last episode. We've got 10 upgrades.

[08:27] Christopher David: We're going to do one video per upgrade,

[08:29] Christopher David: starting with number one. What's number one? Claude, tell them what number one is.

[08:33] Christopher David: Execute, execute, let's go.

[08:35] Christopher David: Yeah, number one, ditch the TUI. Replace janky fake terminals with a proper desktop app featuring a sidebar,

[08:43] Christopher David: chat history,

[08:44] Christopher David: and widgets for managing long-running agents.

[08:45] Christopher David: Hey,

[08:46] Christopher David: hey, hey, TUI people.

[08:46] Christopher David: Why people how long does it take you to switch to a previous thread? Yeah, remember is it continue or resume or last or dash dash?

[08:55] Christopher David: What do I do? How about clicking on it? Oh, you want to be cool?

[08:58] Christopher David: How about command up and down? Oh,

[09:00] Christopher David: yeah,

[09:01] Christopher David: can you do that? You cannot do that. You can do that with open agents

[09:05] Christopher David: Upgrade number one of ten more coming.

[09:07] Christopher David: See you soon