Welcome to the second issue of The Toad Report. If you are new here, Toad is a universal interface for AI I am currently building.

Toads are frogs

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Toad Report, an irregular series where I document updates to Toad—my terminal interface for agentic coding and all things AI.

I’ve been maintaining various Open Source projects for more than a decade now. In that time I have had countless interactions with users reporting issues and submitting pull requests. The vast majority of these interactions are positive, polite, and constructive. In fact, it is these interactions which make me continue to do the work.

While working on Toad, it occurred to me there was a missing feature I would need. Namely streaming markdown.

When talking to an LLM via an API, the Markdown doesn’t arrive all at once. Rather you get fragments of markdown (known as tokens) which should be appended to an existing document. Until recently the only way to render this in Textual was to remove the Markdown widget and add it again with the updated markdown. This worked, but it would get slower to append content as the document grew. It wasn’t a scalable solution.

I’m a little salty that neither Anthropic nor Google reached out to me before they released their terminal-based AI coding agents.