Crush

Sweet spot: a developer who works heavily over SSH, lives inside tmux, or simply prefers TUIs over Electron apps. Crush matches Aider on provider-agnostic philosophy but wins on TUI polish — Charmbracelet ships beautiful terminal software as a matter of course. Failure modes. For contexts where a visual diff matters (large refactors, design-heavy UI work), the TUI is a step down from a real IDE. For users already deep in Cursor or Claude Code, switching to Crush is a preference call, not a capability upgrade. Model-switching cost adds up — each new provider needs an API key and config entry. What to pilot. Install Crush on a remote dev server you SSH into regularly. Use it for one real task end-to-end (a bug fix, a feature). Compare the experience to what you would have done with just your editor + shell + manual copy-paste to Claude. If the TUI keeps you in flow better, it has earned its place in the workflow.

Crush is a terminal-first AI coding assistant from Charmbracelet, the team behind the widely-loved Go TUI libraries (Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, Glow). Unlike editor-embedded copilots (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code), Crush is a standalone CLI / TUI you launch in a repo — it reads your files, keeps conversation context, supports multiple LLM providers, and streams responses with Charmbracelet's signature polish. Key design choices: provider-agnostic (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint), model-switchable mid-session, full session history stored locally, shell-command execution with approval gates, and a genuinely nice TUI experience — keyboard navigation, syntax highlighting, and live streaming. MCP server support lets you extend it with external tools. It is open-source (FSL/Apache), installed via a single Go binary, and runs on any platform Go builds for. For developers who live in the terminal and do not want another Electron app, Crush is the most polished TUI coding assistant to ship in 2025.