Out of the ashes of Textualize, Will McGugan has created toad: “A unified interface for AI in your terminal”.
From McGugan’s release announcement:
My startup for terminals wrapped up mid-2025 when the funding ran dry. So I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career convincing terminals they are actually GUIs.
Skills which I have used to create a terminal app that offers a more pleasant experience for agentic coding. Toad (a play on Textual Code) is a front-end for AI tools such as OpenHands, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and many more. All of which run seamlessly under a single terminal UI, thanks to the ACP protocol.
At the time of writing, Toad supports 12 agent CLIs, and I expect many more to come online soon.
I discovered toad via Rui Carmo, who has been working on a sandbox for various agents, duly named agentbox:
Agentbox - Coding Agent Sandbox
There’s no perfect way to sandbox agents (yet), but at least we can try limiting the damage using containers.
Agentbox is a simple Docker-based coding agent sandbox, originally inspired by running Batrachian Toad as a general-purpose coding assistant TUI and now generalized to more tools.
Whatever agent you prefer, Agentbox aims to provide a reliable and isolated environment which will help you boostrap pretty much any development environment.
Motivation
I found myself wanting to quickly spin up isolated coding environments for AI agents, without having to deal with complex orchestration tools or heavy VMs, and also wanting to limit CPU usage from Batrachian Toad itself.
With LLMs and agentic coding igniting a renaissance in CLIs and textual interfaces, old UNIX-heads like me are having a grand old time.
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