Microsoft's Intelligent Terminal is an experimental fork of Windows Terminal announced at Build 2026, featuring a dockable AI agent pane. Unlike typical Microsoft AI integrations, it's built on the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) — an open standard using JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio — making it compatible with any ACP-compliant agent, not just GitHub Copilot. Supported agents include Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini, and Pi, an open-source coding agent that supports local models via llama.cpp or Ollama. The author connected it to Qwen 3.6 27B running locally in about five minutes using the Pi agent with the pi-acp extension. Key features include automatic error detection that loads shell context into the agent pane, background agent tasks, and multi-tab session management. It's a v0.1 release with limited polish, but the architecture signals Microsoft is treating local AI and model-agnostic design as first-class priorities.
