Someone just brought the golden age of DOS file managers back to life. Except this time, they're running AI agents.
Meet AI-Commander, a new open-source terminal interface built by developer Mikhail Malyshev.
And I have to admit, this thing gives me an unreasonable amount of childhood joy.
Remember Norton Commander?
The blue screens. The silver dialog boxes. The function keys. The beautiful feeling that you were operating a serious computer just by pressing F2.
Well, imagine that aesthetic combined with modern AI coding agents.
That's AI-Commander.
It's a multi-harness TUI designed to bring different AI agent runtimes into one familiar, old-school interface.
Here's what it can do.
1. Multiple AI agent backends
Instead of creating another AI model or agent framework, AI-Commander acts as a frontend for existing agent harnesses.
The current public implementation includes:
OpenCode: Connects through its server API, streams responses, and retrieves available models.
Hermes Agent: Runs through the Hermes CLI, streams output, and manages conversations.
More harnesses planned: The architecture is designed for additional integrations, including DeepSeek's agent harness.
The idea is to make different agent runtimes accessible through a consistent interface.
2. A proper old-school terminal UI
And this is where the nostalgia really kicks in.
You get:
Conversation history in a sidebar
A central chat window
A message composer
Classic Norton Commander-inspired dialogs
Function-key controls
A built-in file browser
Full mouse and keyboard navigation
Russian and English interface languages
It looks like 1995. But the things running inside it belong to 2026.
3. Live agent activity
AI-Commander doesn't just display the final answer.
It supports streaming text, reasoning output, tool calls, Markdown, and code blocks.
You can switch between available models and configure defaults for different harnesses.
There's also support for file and image attachments.
And yes, you can browse files using an interface inspired by Norton Commander.
Which might be the most emotionally satisfying way to attach a screenshot to an AI agent ever invented.
4. Built entirely in Rust
The project uses:
Rust for the application
Ratatui for the terminal interface
Crossterm for terminal interaction
Tokio for asynchronous operations
No browser window pretending to be a desktop application.
No giant web frontend just to display a chat conversation.
A native terminal application with a lightweight architecture.
And it feels refreshingly fast.
5. Designed to support more agents
The architecture uses a pluggable backend interface.
Each new harness gets its own adapter while the rest of the UI stays consistent.
That's particularly interesting because the AI agent ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragmented.
Claude Code.
Codex.
OpenCode.
Hermes.
DeepSeek's experimental agent harnesses.
Everyone has their own runtime, configuration, interface, and way of handling sessions.
But what if you could use your favorite agents without constantly switching interfaces?
That's the idea behind AI-Commander.
Of course, it's still an early-stage project.
The publicly available code currently implements OpenCode and Hermes. Broader support, including DSH, remains part of the development direction rather than a finished integration.
But that's also what makes it interesting.
It's a small, open-source project with a clear idea and plenty of room to grow.
And honestly, I love that someone decided the future of AI agents should look like a DOS application from the 1990s.
We've spent years making developer tools look increasingly polished and complicated.
Rounded corners.
Glass effects.
Animated sidebars.
Entire Chromium instances just to display some text.
And then someone says: What if we simply brought Norton Commander back?
Perfect.
No notes.
Well, maybe a few GitHub issues.
AI-Commander is available on GitHub.
If you like the project, give it a star, open an issue, suggest your favorite agent harness, or contribute.
And if you're old enough to remember Norton Commander, consider this a perfectly valid excuse to feel twelve years old again.
GitHub repository:
https://github.com/mb-mal/ai-commander
Created by: Mikhail Malyshev (@tsingular)
#AICommander #RustLang #OpenCode #HermesAgent #AIAgents #TerminalUI #OpenSource #VibeCoding
YouTube / ABVX