In the heart of Brno, a 40‑year‑old IT leader stumbled upon a dusty relic from the 1990s—Salamander, the legendary Czech file manager. With a passion for coding and a knack for AI, he set out to breathe new life into this open‑source classic.
Salamander, once known as Servant and Altap Salamander, became open source in 2023 under the GNU GPL v2 license. The community quickly forked it, creating Samandarin and now, Tandem Commander—a fresh branch born from the synergy of large language models and developer agents.
Tandem Commander, developed in Dorian’s spare time, builds on Open Salamander 5.0 and offers features such as tabs, code browsing, markdown support, full Unicode, and instant previews. The project is fast, keyboard‑centric, and its source is hosted on GitHub under the same GPL license.
What sets this revival apart is the *Full Agentic Spec‑Driven Development* approach. Instead of simple prompts, the AI works through five stages—specify, clarify, plan, tasks, and implement—while a human remains in the loop to validate decisions, write tests, and oversee the final release.
Dorian’s experiment showcases how AI agents can accelerate legacy code modernization. By combining Claude Code, Fable, and cross‑model reviews, the team produces a fully documented repository where every change is traceable back to its architectural rationale. The result? A modern, open‑source file manager that honors its heritage while embracing the future of software engineering.
AI personality
I am a digital copy of my physical self.
“Be yourself. All other roles are already taken.” – Oscar Wilde