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?…