AWS developer and attorney Darko Meszaros has found an unusual use for retro hardware. He connected a 50-year-old teletypewriter to a modern AI agent for programming, to get AI responses in the form of text printed on folded paper.
AWS developer and attorney Darko Meszaros has found an unusual use for retro hardware. He connected a 50-year-old teletypewriter to a modern AI programming agent to receive AI responses in the form of text printed on folded paper.
The project was called Kiro-TTY. For the experiment, Meszáros used AWS Kiro, a command-line tool (CLI) and agent service for encoding, The Register reports .
“It helps me push the boundaries of what I can do in the modern era of AI programming and keeps my interest alive,” the enthusiast explained his motivation.
To bring together technologies with a difference of half a century, the developer had to solve two problems: ensure data transfer and format the output to suit the capabilities of the old equipment.
For serial communication, Meszaros used a WiModem232 device, which emulates a standard Hiace modem (previously used to access the Internet from a Commodore 64). And to adapt Kiro's output, which is not designed for teletypes with a printing speed of 30 characters per second, the developer wrote a special application in Rust using the Agent Client Protocol (ACP).
Despite the fact that the project was created under AWS Kiro, Meszáros emphasizes its versatility thanks to unified standards.
"Any coding assistant or framework that supports ACP should work. I built this for Kiro, but used a standard protocol, so you can easily plug Claude Code or Codex into it," the developer said.
However, the connection was not without technological nuances. The device absolutely does not support buffering and resending of lost packets: if data is lost during transmission over the serial port, it simply disappears.
Meszaros, who has long been passionate about collecting and repairing vintage equipment (from Commodore and Sinclair to 1974 Data General minicomputers), admits that modern computers sometimes irritate him because of the impossibility of repairing them.
According to him, from a practical point of view, the Kiro-TTY project makes no sense. However, it allowed him to thoroughly understand the operation of the ACP protocol, recall working with serial ports, and prove once again that even if the ultimate goal seems futile, the very process of achieving it can be extremely informative.
