The TUI is built with Textual (https://github.com/textualize/textual/) and uses some of its newest features including background workers and modals. We've made base TUIs before but this is the first one that's a true "app" with many screens and coordinated global state. Happy to answer any questions about working with Textual - once it "clicked" it was surprisingly similar to building a traditional front end! Small note: Terminal.app on MacOS isn't great for TUIs, so while it'll work, we suggest an alternative terminal.

One of our goals with the TUI was to integrate Marvin's bots into the familiar chat UX. Bots can have distinct personalities, instructions, and use plugins, so each one is like a mini "conversational application." You might know about Marvin because of AI Functions, but at its core Marvin is a library for building and deploying bots (in fact, AI functions are actually a bot!). We started building the TUI as a way to quickly explore and assess our bots' capabilities. It quickly became so useful that we decided to make it a first-class experience.

We've preloaded several bots, including one that can guide you through an RPG and another that is obsessed with explaining regex, and will add many more. You can even create your own bots just by asking the default bot (Marvin) to help you.

We hope the TUI is a fun way to quickly interact with your bots and it was a great way for us to learn Textual. Please check out the code and let us know what enhancements we can add!