The Python Dev Who Built Rich, Textual & now Toad Just Redesigned How You Talk to AI

In this GOTO Unscripted episode, Olimpiu Pop sits down with Will McGugan — Python PSF Fellow and creator of Rich (4+ billion downloads) and Textual — to demo his sabbatical project: Toad, a slick terminal-based universal frontend for AI coding agents.
Will's frustration was simple and justified: every major AI coding tool (Claude Code, Gemini, Codex) was built on top-tier models but wrapped in a UI that looked like it was designed in 2004. Toad fixes that by using the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) as a standardized plug-in layer, giving users elegant prompt editing, proper streaming markdown rendering, beautiful tables, syntax highlighting, and a hybrid shell-plus-AI interface — all in the terminal, where developers already live.

The conversation gets sharply honest when the topic turns to AI and developer craft. Will — a 30-year coding veteran who admits it's not instinctive for him to reach for AI — shares a clear-eyed view of its strengths and limits: AI is extraordinarily fast at anything well-defined and unambiguous, but still struggles with genuinely novel problems.

His conclusion?
Most of what software developers do day-to-day isn't actually novel — it's pattern assembly — and that's precisely where AI shines. The future of coding isn't replacement; it's liberation from the mechanical grind. Oh, and the podcast host literally reading out "music intro here" because stage directions ended up in the transcript? That one's a cautionary tale for the ages.