Technical Projects

Fly Plays

Interactive experiment

Giving a fly’s wiring something new to do.

I used a measured map of a fruit fly’s brain and nerve cord to build a browser experiment with Space Invaders and Tetris. A small picture of the game goes into simulated eye cells, signals pass through 166,700 cells and 25.6 million connections, and a controller turns the resulting activity into button presses. The wiring stays fixed while the controller learns from feedback. You can watch the process and see how its scores compare over time.

TypeScript · Neural simulation · Reinforcement learning
Explore Fly Plays

Read how I built it and what the first tests showed ↗

TAUI (Terminal Agent UI)

I am building TAUI (Terminal Agent UI), an open-source standard for autonomous agents in the terminal. Most agents today interact with shells by directly writing raw text or ANSI escape codes. It’s brittle, prone to hallucinations, and breaks the second a terminal resizes.

▶Details

Some developers are having agents write HTML, CSS, or Python scripts to create their own UIs. I believe this isn’t ideal. Having an agent generate executable code for a UI is dangerous because it opens up code injection vectors. It also wastes a massive amount of tokens on verbose boilerplate.

While projects like Google’s A2UI are making great strides in structured web/mobile blocks for agents, the terminal has unique constraints that require a specialized approach.

I’m building TAUI (Terminal Agent UI) to address this. Instead of raw text or code, agents emit a structured TAUI-0001 document. A TAUI adapter handles the rendering in a trusted environment. This approach is inherently secure and significantly more token efficient than generating scripts.

TAUI Example Dashboard
TAUI Htop Demo
"I believe we should move from 'text buffers' to 'structured state documents' for the next generation of autonomous tools."

Mermaidtui

Sometimes you need to visualize a diagram in a terminal environment where heavy libraries aren't an option.Mermaidtui provides a lightweight engine to render flowcharts as clean Unicode or ASCII.

▶Details

Key Features

  • ├─ Standard Mermaid Syntax
  • ├─ Unicode & ASCII Support
  • ├─ Deterministic Grid Layout
  • └─ Zero Heavy Dependencies

Example Output

┌────────┐ ┌──▶│Top Node│─────┐ │ └────────┘ │ ┌────┐ │ │ ┌─────┐ │Root│────┐ └─┌──▶│Final│ └────┘ │ │ └─────┘ │ │ │ ┌───────────┐ │ └──▶│Bottom Node│────┘ └───────────┘

Install CLI

npm install -g mermaidtui

Repository

tariqshams/mermaidtui