Long over due. But finally, it's here.

Last year I saw an interesting thread on V2EX that utilize curl -N to display cool ANSI art, and I wondered how to make it "interactive". After a series of battle with AI coding agents, it's finally done.

The project is located at https://chat.est.im/. You can try it with curl -NT. https://chat.est.im/hello. I wrote a bi-directional streaming with async underneath, all messages were buffered in a queue and delivered in real-time, without any logs.

Lots of trouble when deploying this. Cloudflare and Vercel didn't work, so I have to self-host on IPv6.

To keep messaging secure, a TLS layer is required, so I went along with ACME auto cert renewal as well. In the beginning, I tried HTTP-01 challenge, it requires a standalone 80 port which I think is totally unnecessary, only later to find out there's also TLS-ALPN-01. A good lesson learned with ALPN and stuff.

Also to prevent progress meters in CLI, I read curl's source code with the help of opus-4.5. AI is a good assistant for doing researches.

The curl -T is quite fun, I also built a paste service.

Some may ask why not telnet, ssh or IRC? Because those are pretty ancient, Web crowds are used to curl for everything these days.

The next step would be adding moar pretty ANSI to the server, some chat control commands, and perhaps AI? lol no.