VB6 was the peak of desktop GUI app development change my mind
Why TUIs are back
111–120 of 443 posts
Re: Why TUIs are back
#112I make some things GUIs and some things TUIs. The TUIs are easier to work with Claude Code and Codex. We can co-work on many things together because the LLM harness reads TUIs very fast. You can do it with GUIs but that's much slower, and maintaining two separate interfaces into these things isn't worth the trouble.
Re: Why TUIs are back
#113I think there’s also perhaps an organizational explanation.
A reasonable TUI can be built without any design or frontend people even looped in.
Collaboration and coordination tend to slow down processes and flatten outputs.
Re: Why TUIs are back
#114I think part of it is also that we're able to still LARP as full developers of complex systems while vibe coding by seeing an interface that makes us look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times
I’ve been running Claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions. It’s so nice that I’m not sure I can go back. Pressing continue 15 times is surprisingly heavy, but you don’t notice till you don’t have to do it anymore.
Re: Why TUIs are back
#115My terminal has not been ensh*ttified. I used the Internet for work, for knowledge, more than I use it for entertainment. One of the reasons I like TUIs.
Re: Why TUIs are back
#116ahh the classic - see one anecdote - then create a narrative that the world is changing.
if TUIs were truly back - as DHH would like you to believe - his money maker - Basecamp - would be available as a TUI, Salesforce, Workday, Bloomberg etc would be available as TUIs. Though Bloomberg is the closest to a TUI.
but let's continue to delude ourselves.
Re: Why TUIs are back
#117Developers often say that TUIs are better.
But this is largely a matter of taste. To be honest, outside the programmer class, how many groups of users actually like TUIs? Very few.
Linux is lighter, and these days even gaming through tools like Wine/Proton has improved a lot. So why do Windows and GUI-based systems still sell more and get used more widely? Because most people prefer wrapped UIs. They prefer interfaces that visually package the system for them.
Electron has real problems: memory usage, deployment bloat, and ecosystem fragmentation. But if you move too far toward TUI-first tools, your market target becomes much smaller.
So the real question is: why are TUIs coming back in the AI ecosystem?
My answer is: AI FOMO.
Seriously, why are AI-integrated IDEs like Cursor and Antigravity becoming popular? Even when AI chat is built into the IDE, the IDE often freezes or slows down. If you just open a terminal, it is much faster.
So yes, TUIs are attractive in AI workflows because they are fast, direct, remote-friendly, and easy to automate. But explaining their return only as a failure of GUI is too technical a view.
There is also a social and market reason: people want access to AI workflows as quickly as possible, even if the interface is not what ordinary users would normally prefer.
Re: Why TUIs are back
#118Power users have always preferred the command-line, since expressing what you want to do as a programming language is of course much more powerful and productive than clicking menus.
To avoid context-switching from the command-line, many essential UIs were made text-only. Another route would have been to integrate the command-line within graphical applications, but few did it -- the main example that comes to mind is Jupyter.
Re: Why TUIs are back
#119I totally agree with the author that Windows GUIs and MacOS GUIs are getting worse with every iteration. For my own side project I used ImGUI and it's working great for my purpose.
It's by far not as beautiful rendered as the native OS layers, but easy to navigate and a good foundation for cross platform GUI development. And I got it even approved for the MacOS app store. Here's my write up: https://marchildmann.com/blog/imgui-mac-app-store/
Re: Why TUIs are back
#120I think part of it is also that we're able to still LARP as full developers of complex systems while vibe coding by seeing an interface that makes us look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times
Having worked with development since the early 2000s, I think its great that development has become more accessible and I dont particularly like that the old guard tries to gate-keep the idea of "being a developer". Being an engineer I feel requires more credentials, it always has. But if you feel like you're a developer, all the more power to you!