TL;DR — AgentZero Lite is a Windows-native, single-binary shell built around one idea: in the AI era, most of your day is spent talking to command-line tools. Each AI CLI (Claude, Codex, the next one) wants its own terminal; you want them all visible, addressable, and able to talk to each other. This post is a feature tour grounded in the actual UI and code.

🌐 Series: Part 2 — An LLM Is Not an Agent · GitHub: psmon/AgentZeroLite

What it is, in one sentence

A Windows desktop shell that runs N ConPTY terminals side by side, with a small chat pane that can either type into the active terminal or (in AIMODE) let an on-device LLM coordinate them all for you. One binary, no cloud calls, ~60 MB.

1 — The main window

The main window is three regions: a left rail of workspaces and sessions, a top tab strip of terminal tabs, and a status bar at the bottom. A workspace is just a folder context — pick one and every new tab opens with cd already done. Tabs are real ConPTY (Microsoft.Terminal.Control over the Windows pseudo-console API), so claude, codex, gh, pwsh, a build log tail — anything you'd run in a shell — runs unmodified.

The tab title is load-bearing: it's the peer name the AgentBot uses to address that tab, both for the AIMODE relay and for the cross-terminal dialogue trick (next section).

2 — The signature trick: two AI CLIs talking to each other

This is the use case the Lite edition was built for, and it takes about a minute to set up:

1. Open two tabs in the same workspace — say, group 0 tab 0 = claude, group 0 tab 1 = codex.
2. In each tab, paste a one-line briefing: "Learn AgentZeroLite.ps1 help and use it for cross-terminal talk. Use terminal-send <grp> <tab> "text" to talk, terminal-read <grp> <tab> to read."
3. In the Claude tab, ask it to "Greet the tab named Codex and propose we co-design a REST endpoint." Claude runs the CLI, Codex sees the message at its prompt, replies back — you watch the conversation stream in both tabs.

What makes this work, mechanically:

• Each AI runs in its own ConPTY. No shared memory, no context leakage.
• Messages traverse AgentZero's IPC (WM_COPYDATA + memory-mapped files) — not a cloud relay. Nothing leaves the machine.
• The "broker" is just a CLI command (AgentZeroLite.exe -cli terminal-send …) — any CLI-native agent the AI already knows how to invoke a shell from will do.
• You can interrupt, nudge, or splice in at any step. The human stays the supervisor.

Terminal multiplexers let you watch many prompts; AgentZero Lite lets them talk.

3 — The AgentBot pane (text broker, not an AI by default)