Television

Television is an open-source visual workspace for people who already use a personal agent. Instead of leaving every result inside a chat transcript, it gives the user and the agent a shared place to create, arrange, revisit, and update artifacts. Those artifacts can be simple cards, interactive views, documents, data displays, visualizations, live web pages, or small apps and interfaces. The product acts as a sidecar to the existing chat experience, so it doesn't replace the agent harness or model. Its job is to give useful outputs a persistent visual home once the conversation has moved on.

The core idea is straightforward. A user talks to an agent as usual, but the agent can place a visual result on Television and modify it later. Artifacts remain malleable rather than becoming static attachments. Channels provide persistent spaces where related artifacts can be collected and arranged over time. That makes the interface suitable for work that evolves across multiple conversations, such as a calendar that changes during the week, a task board that gets checked off, or a table that grows as new records arrive. The official examples include reusable skills for calendars, tasks, and dense table views, showing how an agent can turn familiar requests into working interfaces. A user can return to a channel instead of asking the agent to reconstruct an earlier output from chat history.

Television consists of a lightweight local server, a skills bundle, and a client application. The server runs on the same Linux or macOS machine as the agent and lets the agent communicate with the visual client. The installed skills teach the agent how Television works and how to create or update artifacts and the surrounding environment. The client then presents those artifacts beside the chat interface. Mac users can download an Electron app for Apple Silicon systems running macOS 12 or later. Other platforms can open an experimental browser interface, provided the connected agent itself is running on Linux or macOS. During the browser setup, the agent installs the pieces and returns a URL that can be opened from the viewing device.

It works with any agent harness that supports skills and file access. The project specifically points to Hermes, OpenClaw, Pi, Claude Code, and Codex as recommended options, but it doesn't tie the interface to one model vendor. That makes Television interesting for technical users who experiment with different harnesses yet want a consistent visual layer. It fits personal workflows where an agent produces information worth keeping in view, including ongoing project status, weekly plans, research tables, dashboards, checklists, and small interactive tools. It can also display external web pages in artifacts when the client supports them.

The distinction is that Television treats generated interfaces as working objects rather than decorative previews. A card can hold a concise status, while an interactive artifact can accept input or reflect changing data. Channels supply organization without forcing everything into one long chronological feed. Reusable skills give the agent instructions for producing a recognizable interface again, and users can adapt or share those instructions. The product still depends on the connected agent to do the reasoning and file work, so capability varies with the harness and model. The macOS client also has advantages over the browser client, notably support for artifacts that load external web pages. This division is worth understanding before setup because the server, client, and existing chat interface remain separate parts of the experience.

Television is free and open source under the MIT license. The source is available on GitHub, and advanced users can build it with Node.js 24 and a compatible npm version. The documented source workflow can also run the server as a persistent system service, which suits an interface intended to remain available beside an agent. Installation is easiest through the macOS download, while the browser option requires the agent-assisted server setup described by the project. Windows-hosted agents are not currently supported, and the browser interface is explicitly described as experimental. The maintainers accept bug reports and feedback, but their spec-driven contribution process isn't open to outside contributors yet. For users comfortable running a personal agent on Linux or macOS, Television offers a concrete way to move recurring work out of chat and into a visual workspace that can change with the project.