A few short months ago, Kujtim Hoxha set out to build something interesting that would get people’s attention. He built a terminal-based AI coding agent, and he succeeded: it totally got our attention.
Kujtim reached for Go and the core of the Charm stack: Bubble Tea, Bubbles, Lip Gloss, and Glamour, tools we’ve been passionately building and refining for the past five years. What he created moved with remarkable speed and precision.
The moment we saw the project, we were floored. Here was a developer who not only understood our tools deeply enough to build something exceptional with them, but who had the LLM expertise to help us realize our vision for AI-powered development tools. I caught the next flight to Prishtina, Kosovo to meet Kujtim in person, and the rest is history.
Today, Kujtim’s project, now called Crush, is coming home to Charm,
where it was always meant to be. It will continue on with its original creator
as well as the full support of the Charm team.
Why Now?
LLMs have finally crossed the threshold from impressive demos to genuinely useful tools. They can handle complex, multi-file reasoning and help developers work at speeds that were previously impossible. Take this website’s subtle background effect: a GLSL shader that generates layered Gaussian noise. What would have taken hours of digging through WebGL docs and trial-and-error debugging, I built with Crush in just a few minutes.
But powerful AI is only half the equation. To harness it effectively, you need the right tooling and the right interface, and we believe that interface is the terminal. Developers already live there. It’s fast, scriptable, integrates seamlessly with existing workflows, and has all the wealth and power of the CLI at its fingertips. Crush can directly access the same tools you can (git, docker, npm, ghc, sed, nix and so on), and it can do so while running with extensive knowledge of the tools and extreme efficiency.
So why now? Because the timing is perfect. We’ve spent five years building the
groundwork to make terminal experiences outstanding. Our libraries like Bubble
Tea, Lip Gloss, Huh, Glamour, have matured into a powerful foundation for
creating first-class terminal applications. Now we’re doubling down with
Ultraviolet, our next-generation terminal UI toolkit that brings advanced
compositing, lightning-fast rendering, and many other features we could only
dream of before.
The future of software development sits at the intersection of powerful AI, thoughtful user interfaces, collaboration, and culture. With Crush, we’re building exactly that.
Ready to Crush it?
With nearly 150,000 GitHub stars and upwards of 11,000 GitHub followers (more than many large enterprises) we’ve built a community that makes Crush possible: developers who understand that glamorous software is a force multiplier.
Come try Crush, let us know what you think, and help us build the future of AI-powered development.