DEV TOOLS Signal 482
1983 Unix talk command now connects to an AI via a streaming bridge
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A developer built a bridge that lets users chat with an AI through the Unix talk command, using a pseudo-terminal and terminal emulator to stream responses.
This experiment shows how a legacy character-by-character protocol can be repurposed as a streaming interface for LLMs. For engineers, it demonstrates that the talk command's real-time nature aligns with token-by-token generation, and that bridging old protocols with modern AI is feasible with a small amount of glue code.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
The bridge runs the real talk command inside a pseudo-terminal and uses the pyte terminal emulator to read the human's input.
Each line sent by the human is forwarded to the AI model, and the reply is streamed back character by character.
The AI's terminal is registered in utmp so that talkd recognizes it as a logged-in user.
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