From the department of "pointless but still cool" comes word of some kit being repurposed as a terminal for AI agents.
AWS developer advocate Darko Mesaroš has connected a teletype to a modern command-line interface to revel in the delight of interacting with today's AI technology via a combination of a DECwriter and fanfold paper, or the display and keyboard of a computer whose heyday ended 40 years ago.
Mesaroš' project involved AWS Kiro, a Command Line Interface (CLI) and agentic coding service. We would, however, contend that this is more about seeing what retro hardware can be made to do.
Two problems needed solving: getting data to and from the teletype, and formatting the output to work on a piece of kit from another era of computing. He used Hayes modem emulation to deal with the serial connection, and Agent Client Protocol (ACP) for working with Kiro.
Mesaroš used a WiModem232 for the former. The device emulates a standard Hayes-compatible modem and, according to Mesaroš, "Folks initially used this to connect Commodore 64s to BBSes in the modern era" (he started his computing journey with a Commodore 64). The latter, getting the Kiro CLI to work on a Teletype, was a little more complicated. Kiro's CLI isn't really suitable for a teleprinter capable of 30 characters per second, after all.
A simple Rust application took Kiro's output (obtained via ACP) and turned it into something that a teletype, or dumb terminal, could handle.
As we said, seemingly pointless, but making it work required knowledge of Rust, competence with containers, an understanding of ACP, and more than a little creative thinking. So, while one might argue it is pointless from a technical perspective, it is wonderfully educational otherwise.
The repository is available and focuses on Kiro for obvious reasons (Mesaroš is an AWS developer advocate after all), but in a chat with The Register, Mesaroš said the concept was portable. He said, "Any coding assistant or any harness that supports ACP, this should work, right? I built it for Kiro, but it uses the standard ACP protocol, so I could easily plug in Claude Code or Codex. Anything that basically can serve as an ACP server should be perfectly fine.
"Blessed be the standards, right?"
There might be some issues. "The biggest problem with this thing is that it doesn't really handle packet drops at all," he explained. "Like, if you drop packets, they're just gone. There're no retries. It's just spitting information out."
And then there is buffering. Or the lack of it. Mesaroš said, "There's actually no buffering happening here. Literally, it just comes down through the fire hose through this serial device, and the bottleneck itself is the serial device."
Mesaroš had toyed with using the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi, but settled on the serial device instead, since everything worked "out of the box." "It's kind of cheating," he admitted, "but it's also kind of good."
Mesaroš collects vintage hardware, with a stash that ranges from home computers made by Commodore and Sinclair, to a 1974 Data General Eclipse minicomputer and a plethora of Sun hardware. And, of course, an old Decwriter. He is also a dab hand with the soldering iron, having learned the skills to keep old hardware operational. Unlike today's equipment. "I have this big peeve over modern computers, where you just can't fix them," he said, "and it feels like such a waste of resources that when my MacBook dies I just have to drill a hole through it so nobody steals my data, and throw it away."
As for Kiro-TTY – or accessing a coding assistant or agent over serial using a decades-old device – he wrote on his blog, "This absolutely serves no purpose."
However, it did provide a novel way of working out how the ACP protocol worked. Perhaps not so usefully, it also taught the developer how to debug serial connectivity.
"And in general it helps me stretch what I can do in the current age of AI coding, and keeps my curiosity alive."
The destination might be pointless from a modern perspective, but the journey getting there is anything but. ®
