Giving Amplifier Eyes

How an AI built its own terminal vision

The Blind Spot

Amplifier ships a terminal UI it literally cannot see

amplifier-tui is a Textual terminal client for Amplifier. When its UI breaks, a human has to run it, reproduce the glitch, and relay every bug back by hand.

The client is real — and so is the cost of being blind to it.

The Evidence

amplifier-tui is a real 284-commit Textual client with a steady stream of UI fixes

Built with Textual, developed 2026-02-05 to 2026-04-23. A keyword heuristic finds ~21 fix commits touching render, layout, and completion.

The buggy UI and its debugging cost are real, not hypothetical.

284

total commits (282 by Sam Schillace)

~21

UI / render / layout / completion fix commits (heuristic)

Textual

framework the TUI client is built with

The Bottleneck

A terminal-blind agent can't reproduce a glitch it can't render

With no way to see or drive a terminal, debugging stalls on a slow human loop: run the app, reproduce the bug, describe it, relay it back.

This is the manual relay worth solving — so what did Amplifier do about it?

The Turn

Instead of a workaround, Amplifier built itself a tool

The amplifier-bundle-tui-tester bundle, authored by Diego Colombo with Amplifier as co-author — both key commits marked "Generated with Amplifier."

Here's the named artifact the rest of the deck leans on.

Author: Diego Colombo (all 6 commits)
Co-author: Amplifier — "Generated with Amplifier" on commits bc903d3 and 4853402
Footprint: 17 git-tracked files; core Python module 1,146 lines

How It Works · 1 of 2

The tui_terminal tool spawns any TUI headless in a real pseudo-terminal

It forks a PTY (pty.fork) and runs the app under /bin/sh — no X11 display server required — then drives it through six operations.

Now there's a live app to look at. Next: making it visible.

spawn

send_keys

capture

resize

close

list

62 named special keys · resize sends SIGWINCH + TIOCSWINSZ · pyte + Pillow

How It Works · 2 of 2

Every capture returns three views of the screen

Plain text, ANSI-escaped text, and a rendered PNG screenshot with full xterm-256, true-color, and bold fidelity — turning terminal state into an image an AI can read.

A picture an agent can actually see. Now who looks at it?

text

plain screen display

ansi

ANSI-escaped rows

PNG

rendered image · xterm-256 + true-color + bold

The Payoff

A tui-test-analyst reads those screenshots with AI vision

The bundle ships one AI-vision analysis agent, tui-test-analyst — and its own examples point it straight at the very client that motivated it.

Amplifier now sees and fixes its own UI.

# the bundle's own example target
uv run amplifier-tui run

# AI-vision agent
tui-tester:tui-test-analyst

The Throughline

Shipped in a day, hardened three weeks later with 167 passing tests

Initial commit 2026-01-30; major hardening 2026-02-23 added xterm-256 rendering, real resize, and the test suite. When an agent lacks a sense, it can build one.

Agentic self-tooling closes its own capability gaps.

167

unit tests, all passing (167 passed in 42.86s)

1 day

initial ship: 5 same-day commits on 2026-01-30

v0.1.0

published, public on GitHub main · Alpha

Sources

Sources & Research Methodology

Data as of: 2026-02-23 (repo pushedAt 2026-02-23T07:44:00Z)

Feature status: Working, published, tested — bundle v0.1.0, Development Status :: 3 - Alpha, public on GitHub main.

Primary sources: colombod/amplifier-bundle-tui-tester (cloned to /tmp/tui-tester-src); ramparte/amplifier-tui (the Textual TUI client).

Research performed:

Tests re-run: cd /tmp/tui-tester-src/modules/tool-tui-tester && uv run --with pyte --with Pillow --with pytest --with pytest-asyncio python -m pytest -q → 167 passed in 42.86s
Operations enum: grep -n '"enum"' amplifier_module_tool_tui_tester/__init__.py → spawn, send_keys, capture, resize, close, list
Special keys count: loaded keys.py SPECIAL_KEYS via importlib → len 62
Headless PTY: grep -nE 'execvpe|/bin/sh|pty.fork' session_manager.py
Resize: grep -nE 'SIGWINCH|TIOCSWINSZ|ioctl' session_manager.py
Authorship: git show -s --format='%B' bc903d3 4853402 (Generated with Amplifier; Co-Authored-By trailers)
Timeline: git log --pretty=format:'%h|%ad|%s' --date=short; gh repo view colombod/amplifier-bundle-tui-tester
Client history: cd /home/ramparte/dev/ANext/amplifier-tui && git log --oneline | wc -l (284); heuristic grep of fix subjects → 21
Footprint: git ls-files | wc -l (17); wc -l amplifier_module_tool_tui_tester/*.py (1,146)

Gaps: The "~21 UI fix" count is a keyword heuristic, not an authoritative bug count. No commit attributes an amplifier-tui fix to the tui-tester tool; the connection is via the bundle's own README/example targeting amplifier-tui. The "manual relay" pain is inferred, not stated in any single commit.

Primary contributors: Diego Colombo (bundle, 6/6 commits) with Amplifier co-author; Sam Schillace (amplifier-tui client, 282/284 commits).