Termic launches open-source CLI agent manager that runs the real binaries, not wrappers

A new open-source tool called Termic is taking a novel approach to managing AI coding agents: instead of wrapping vendor CLIs with its own SDK or proxy layer, it spawns the actual CLI binaries (Claude, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, OpenCode) in pseudo-terminals and inherits their existing authentication. The pitch is that when Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI ship a feature in their native CLI, Termic users get it the same day — no waiting for a wrapper to catch up.

The application, free and AGPL-3.0 licensed, is built with a Rust backend and a WKWebView frontend, coming in at roughly 10 MB versus an Electron equivalent. It supports adding custom CLI tools like Aider or any command that runs in a PTY in about 30 seconds. For teams, per-repo configuration lives in a .termic.yaml file, so setup is shared across clones.

One notable detail is the billing angle: Anthropic's June 15, 2026 Agent SDK credit change applies to the SDK path (and claude -p, GitHub Actions, and third-party apps that authenticate through the SDK). Because Termic spawns the interactive claude CLI directly — the same binary you'd run in a terminal — it stays on the standard Pro / Max subscription, outside the SDK credit meter. The project's messaging leans hard on this: "No per-token markup, no hidden proxy, no custom agent loop between you and the vendor CLI."

Feature-wise, Termic offers tabbed agents, a built-in editor and diff viewer, inline code review comments that batch into a single message, and a "Spotlight" system that mirrors a task's changes into the main checkout as a detached HEAD (so no stray commits land on your branch). It also includes an optional sandbox using macOS Seatbelt and an in-process Rust CONNECT proxy with a hostname allowlist, default-deny on file system access to ~/.ssh, ~/.aws, Keychains, and other sensitive areas.

Under the hood, the editor is CodeMirror (~150 KB), the terminal renderer is a WebGL-based one that avoids row gaps in TUI apps, and the PTY handling uses the same crate as Wezterm. State is managed with plain React hooks — no reducers or thunks. The project is available for macOS and Linux now, with Windows support promised soon.