WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal(simedw.com)
650 points by alphax314 3 days ago | 192 comments
tl;dr: A developer fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B (shrunk to 360M params, quantized to int4/208MB) to simulate a terminal by predicting screen deltas from keypresses, with no actual shell or filesystem underneath. Key tricks included parallel per-row decoding with speculative verification for speed, and DAgger-style self-correction training to prevent compounding errors; the result can run vim, tmux, snake, and Python in-browser via WebGPU, and even remembers file contents written in earlier commands. It's not practically useful, but demonstrates that a small model can maintain a surprisingly consistent "world" without encoding any underlying rules.
HN Discussion:
  • ↑Author engagement and appreciation for the technical achievement of fine-tuning a small model
  • ↑This exemplifies the broader concept of 'Neural Computers' where UI is entirely generative
  • ↑Project raises interesting philosophical questions about prediction versus actual intelligence
  • •Sharing similar related projects for comparison (lossy git, vibeSH, ChatGPT-as-terminal)
  • •Technical/practical notes like WebGPU support in Firefox and surprise at memory improvements from fine-tuning