Tendril vs TUI-use

Tendril is an open-source desktop agent built on a radically minimal architecture: instead of giving an AI model dozens of pre-built tools, it gives the model exactly three — search capabilities, register capabilities, and execute code. When you ask it to do something it can't yet do, it writes the tool, registers it, and runs it. The next time you ask for something similar, the tool already exists. Built with Tauri, React, and Node.js on the frontend, and AWS Bedrock (Claude) for inference, Tendril runs code in sandboxed Deno environments for safety. The capability registry grows organically across sessions, meaning the agent becomes measurably more capable the longer you use it — without any retraining or fine-tuning. The "too many tools" problem is a real issue in production agents: large tool lists degrade model reasoning and increase hallucination rates. Tendril's inversion of this pattern — grow tools from need, not configuration — is a genuine architectural contribution. It's MIT licensed and free to use, though AWS Bedrock access for Claude adds ongoing inference costs.

TUI-use is an open-source library that gives AI agents the ability to interact with traditional interactive terminal (TUI) applications — think vim, htop, ssh sessions, database CLIs, and legacy text-based UIs that were never designed for programmatic control. Instead of requiring a GUI or a REST API, TUI-use interprets terminal output as structured state and sends synthetic keystrokes back, enabling agents to "see" and "drive" any TUI application as if they were a human at a keyboard. The project was born from a real pain point: AI coding agents can call bash commands and write files, but they fail badly the moment a tool opens an interactive prompt waiting for user input. TUI-use solves this by building a state machine layer over PTY (pseudo-terminal) interfaces, letting agents read the current screen buffer, detect interactive prompts, and respond intelligently. It ships with adapters for common TUI patterns and a clean API that works with any LLM tool-use framework. The Show HN post attracted genuine interest from the ops and DevOps community — many existing workflows depend on tools that expose only an interactive terminal interface. TUI-use fills a real gap in the "AI agents that control computers" space by handling the long tail of CLI programs that have no API, no GUI, and no intention of ever getting one.