Yes, it is still 2026 and you read that title correctly. I built an IRC client. Slack, Discord, and Matrix all still exist. But here we are. I made an IRC client, and I'm going to tell you about it.
Why IRC in 2026?
If you aren't familiar with it, internet relay chat is a federated chat protocol that's been around since I have been alive (1988). Despite its age there are still thriving communities on it and frankly, it's one of the best places for open source and open communities to be run. Discord and Slack are proprietary protocols and Matrix has a much higher barrier to entry for both running a server and just connecting.
I had a question I wanted answered and thought, "well, I'll just download an IRC client and ask it." Upon browsing the list of modern IRCv3 clients it became clear there aren't actually that many easy to use, well-maintained, and free clients. For reference, I found one called Halloy that is pretty sweet, but the configuration requires a managing a YAML file. Textual is no longer maintained, and HexChat's creator has completely warded off their MacOS build. That leaves some software as a service called IRCCloud that I'd need to pay a subscription to.
So, that's how we got here.
Ulterior motives
Part of the motivation I had to do this is that I got downvoted on HN for trying to explain to someone that you can indeed work on larger, more complex projects with AI tools. Unfortunately, I think it didn't really hit the mark because the project iI was referencing wasn't public. The claim here is that every example some people see of AI built code is simple greenfield hobby projects. While I get why some people might think that, it's just not true in my experience and AI is one of those tools where the outcomes are very binary. Some users find it incredibly useful in a variety of use cases and others are struggling to find any useful application and begin using the word "slop" like a comma.
While this project is greenfield, it's not that simple. IRC is best thought of in a complex event driven architecture. The lifetime of those events and especially how they're integrated with a plugin system need to be well thought out and implemented.
So, the ulterior motive here is that I'd like to share what a successful project looks like when using AI tools.
Conclusion
So, yes, I built an IRC client in 2026. It's pretty basic but I do intend to continue using it so naturally over time it'll get done. If you want to contribute, I BSD-licensed the code so feel free to fork it and make it your own.