Research, plan, write, automate, build — impulse partners on whatever you're working on. Brutally minimal, and provider-flexible: bring any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible model.
I have an opinionated view of what a terminal tool should be — and I couldn't find one that matched it. So I built my own: one that's exactly as simple or as complex as my own work needs it to be, and nothing more.
That's the whole idea. impulse isn't trying to be everything for everyone. It's a co-partner shaped around how I actually work, kept deliberately small, and shared openly for anyone who sees the terminal the same way.
impulse lives in your terminal and works alongside you on whatever you're doing: research a problem, plan an approach, draft and edit, run things, dispatch sub-agents. Opinionated and simple on purpose — no lock-in, no bloat.
Research, planning, writing, automation, code — whatever the work is, it partners on it.
Hand off work to parallel sub-agents and watch their progress stream back inline.
AGENT, EXPLORE, PLAN, DEBUG — press Tab to change how it works.
Any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible endpoint. Automatic model discovery, persistent config.
The terminal is quietly becoming a primary way people get things done — not just engineers. It's fast, focused, and free of the noise that fills most apps. It's also where I spend most of my day, so it's where impulse lives. No new window to learn, no context to leave behind.
Install it, run impulse, and the first launch walks you through a short setup — who you are, how you like to be spoken to, and which model to use. After that, just type what you need in plain language. impulse works out the steps, does the work, and shows you what it did. Change how it approaches a task with a single keypress.
One command. First run walks you through picking a provider and a model.
Spencer is an AI-enabled developer and product manager who works at the intersection of engineering and product. He's drawn to opinionated, self-directed tools — software shaped around how he actually works rather than someone else's defaults. When the thing he needs doesn't quite exist yet, he builds it.
impulse is exactly that: a co-partner in the terminal, kept deliberately small. If you build something with it or want a provider added, reach out.
Thanks to Mario Zechner — for the pi agent that inspired the rework, and pi-tui, the terminal UI framework impulse is built on.
