Interfaces overview
Babel is one product with several surfaces. These are interfaces to the same harness — not separate products with separate runtimes.
| Surface | What it is | Today’s state |
|---|---|---|
Terminal TUI (interactive) |
The primary interface: multi-turn chat/plan/deep in your terminal | Present in source; the daily path |
Headless CLI (chat --headless, run) |
The same chat engine with JSON output for scripts and CI | Present in source |
| Desktop (Electron) | Windows UI around the bundled CLI; provider/model setup, project picker, streaming run view | See Get Babel for verified available Setup.exe and portable assets; packages are unsigned |
MCP inspection (mcp) |
Read-only control-plane server for other tools | Present in source; inspection only |
How they relate
Section titled “How they relate”- The Desktop shell runs the sibling Babel CLI for real work; it does not reimplement the agent.
- Headless output is a mode of the same engine, not a second product.
- The MCP entrypoint is deliberately read-only — it is not the everyday coding entrypoint.
What each page covers
Section titled “What each page covers”- Desktop — the shell, its bundled runtime, and its explicit limits.
- The TUI and headless surfaces are covered throughout Using Babel.