Research2026-10-21
An individual fine-tuned a 360M-parameter model to act as a terminal. It predicts screen changes from keypresses without a real shell. The model can run vim, tmux, Python and snake. It remembers commands across sessions. Training used 336k synthetic terminal sessions. Parallel row decoding cut large-frame latency from 6.7s to 0.87s. The model was shrunk to 208 MB for a browser demo. It struggles with complex Python and nested directories. Firefox runs the demo 20x slower than Chrome.
What changed
Terminal emulators required a real shell and filesystem to function.
What it unlocks
Running a terminal-like interface entirely in a browser with no backend shell or filesystem.
- 360M parameters
- 336k training episodes
- 2B tokens
- 75 GPU-hours on RTX 4090
What you need to act on it
- WebGPU support
- a physical keyboard
- Chrome or Edge for best performance
Sources