AI Research Assistant Terminal Interface

Problem/Feature Description

A data science team has built a Spring Boot backend that exposes a conversational AI research assistant over HTTP. Researchers need a polished terminal client to interact with it without leaving their development environment. The backend accepts POST requests with a plain-text question and returns a plain-text answer.

The terminal interface must not freeze or become unresponsive while waiting for the AI backend to reply (responses can take several seconds). The team also wants the client distributed as part of their existing Spring Boot application JAR rather than as a separate process — the TUI should launch when the application starts, without spinning up a web server on the client side.

A partial Spring Boot project is provided. The agent should implement the full TUI integration layer and document the architecture in a short writeup.

Output Specification

• src/main/java/com/example/ResearchChatModel.java — TUI4J Model that makes async HTTP calls to the backend
• src/main/java/com/example/TuiRunner.java — Spring Boot component that launches the TUI
• src/main/resources/application.properties — Spring Boot configuration for TUI-only mode
• architecture.md — describes how async calls are handled and why the approach avoids UI blocking

Input Files

The following files are provided as inputs. Extract them before beginning.

=============== FILE: pom.xml ===============

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd"> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>com.example</groupId> <artifactId>research-assistant-tui</artifactId> <version>1.0.0</version> <properties> <maven.compiler.source>17</maven.compiler.source> <maven.compiler.target>17</maven.compiler.target> </properties> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>com.williamcallahan</groupId> <artifactId>tui4j</artifactId> <version>0.3.3</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId> <version>3.2.0</version> </dependency> </dependencies> <build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>3.2.0</version> </plugin> </plugins> </build> </project>

=============== FILE: src/main/java/com/example/ResearchAssistantApp.java =============== package com.example;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;

@SpringBootApplication public class ResearchAssistantApp { public static void main(String[] args) { SpringApplication.run(ResearchAssistantApp.class, args); } }