Show HN: HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the Terminal

This is a model I’ve been thinking about lately. It demonstrates a pattern that I’m wondering could exist, where terminal applications, BBS-style shared user boards, and other expressions of creativity and sharing are created with web technologies but rendered into the terminal and accessed over SSH.

I like that this brings back some kind of old days of the internet feeling and uses web technologies but sidesteps the public World Wide Web, even though it’s still on the internet.

You can try it out too right now, and I’m thinking about making the self-hosting specialized applications part a first-class thing. But right now, the project is organized as a browser rendering engine, which I spent eight years on since the end of 2018, most of that without AI, writing all the code myself. And then a terminal renderer, which connects to that browser renderer and takes its output and bookkeeping and renders it into the terminal.

And that is designed by me, including the layout algorithm, but AI wrote almost all the code. So I am basically a software designer and AI nudger in that one. My flow is essentially like one agent at a time, and I’ll monitor it, nudge it based on my intuitions if it gets stuck or needs help or whatever, and guide it towards the goal. Plus being the designer and decision maker.

AI makes a lot of decisions, but I make the most of them. So that’s just describing my flow of how I created this terminal thing, which is roughly around a year old.

And originally it was created with Gemini Pro 3.1, which at that time a year ago was sort of the most capable model for complex tasks. And I literally did it on the free AI Studio web application, just like pasting in code listings. Obviously, with agents now, everything is much smoother as a workflow.

This demo has some kind of a cap on it, so let me know if it hits that. It probably won’t, but feel free to tell me. And you can self-host it today. Let me know if you want to do that.

This text was dictated by me and then had punctuation and paragraphing added, but the wording was not changed.