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Building a TUI is easy now

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Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#41

Post by mulmen »

mseepgood wrote: post #30
elevation wrote: post #25

As LLMs consume all our compute resources and drive up prices for the compute hardware on which we run applications, the silver lining is that LLMs are helpful in implementing tooling without a heavy stack so it will run quickly on a lower-spec computer. I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient da…

The question is how many decades each user of your software would have to use it in order to offset, through the optimisation it provides, the energy consumption you burned through with LLMs.

I’m not really worried about energy consumption. We have more energy falling out of the sky than we could ever need. I’m much more interested in saving human time so we can focus on bigger problems, like using that free energy instead of killing ourselves extracting and burning limited resources.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#42

Post by rirze »

socalgal2 wrote: post #8

Do we want tuis? I can’t stand Gemmin-CLI. That tui gets in the way constantly I’m mixed in jj’s tui. It’s better than no ui tho Mostly tho I’m curious when I’d want a tui. Most of the time in a terminal I don’t want one

Have you tried jjui? It’s pretty nice

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#44

Post by empath75 »

I was working on a fairly niche thing, a library of crossplane compositions written in KCL and thought it would be nice to have a TUI so i could browse through them and see the rendered yaml as claude was working on it. I asked claude code to write it with python and textual and it one shotted it in about two minutes including a test suite.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#45

Post by grogenaut »

mseepgood wrote: post #30
elevation wrote: post #25

As LLMs consume all our compute resources and drive up prices for the compute hardware on which we run applications, the silver lining is that LLMs are helpful in implementing tooling without a heavy stack so it will run quickly on a lower-spec computer. I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient da…

The question is how many decades each user of your software would have to use it in order to offset, through the optimisation it provides, the energy consumption you burned through with LLMs.

In the past week I made 4 different tasks that were going to make my m4brun at full tilt for a week optimized down to 20 minutes with just a few prompts. So more like an hour to pay off not decades. average claude invocation is .3 wh. m4 usez 40-60 watts, so 24x7x40 >> .3 * 10

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#46

Post by prydt »

tantalor wrote: post #40

> most importantly, they live inline to your code, preventing constant tab switching No idea what this means.

I think the implicit assumption here is that you are using a terminal-based code editor like neovim... which is not necessarily true.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#47

Post by qingcharles »

Gemini built a nice TUI for me for a DHT scraper project I was coding:

https://imgur.com/a/u3KHbDT

It was like two-shot, cos the first version had some issues with CJK chars.

I was impressed as it would have taken me a bunch of screwing around on lining up all the data etc when I wanted to concentrate on the scraping algorithm, not the pretty bits.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#48

Post by dwb »

I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad. Mainly because they’re largely inaccessible. They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely. I get why people build TUIs, but it’s a sorry state of affairs.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#49

Post by elevation »

mseepgood wrote: post #30
elevation wrote: post #25

As LLMs consume all our compute resources and drive up prices for the compute hardware on which we run applications, the silver lining is that LLMs are helpful in implementing tooling without a heavy stack so it will run quickly on a lower-spec computer. I've achieved 3 and 4 orders of magnitude CPU performance boosts and 50% RAM reductions using C in places I wouldn't normally and by selecting/designing efficient da…

The question is how many decades each user of your software would have to use it in order to offset, through the optimisation it provides, the energy consumption you burned through with LLMs.

When global supply chains are disrupted again, energy and/or compute costs will skyrocket, meaning your org may be forced to defer hardware upgrades and LLMs may no longer be cost effective (as over-leveraged AI companies attempt to recover their investment with less hardware than they'd planned.) Once this happens, it may be too late to draw on LLMs to quickly refactor your code.

If your business requirements are stable and you have a good test suite, you're living in a golden age for leveraging your current access to LLMs to reduce your future operational costs.

Re: Building a TUI is easy now

#50

Post by qingcharles »

SoftTalker wrote: post #12

I don't see any real advantage of TUIs over web forms or GUIs for the same thing. I do like CLIs though, especially the ones that are properly capable of working in pipelines. Composing a pipeline of simple command-line utilities to achieve exactly what you want is very powerful.

Gemini made a lovely TUI for my C# project, but afterwards it said it could just spin up a Kestrel web server inside the app instead which would be a much better solution for managing it, which was fair. (I have a line in my Agents to warn me when I specify a way of building something and it's not the ideal solution)
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