I 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
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> look like l33t h4xx0rs even though we're just pressing continue 15 times
I feel seen.
I also think there’s a certain element of reacting against absolutely everything becoming a bloated electron app.
I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.
> I have no doubt - if it hasn’t already happened - that some apps will unironically embrace the most ridiculous option by shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end.
Claude code is almost there
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/theres-a-react-app-running-...
Considering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.
The culprit is using web technologies where they don't belong, which Electron is also guilty of. Claude Code is 400k lines of JavaScript for a TUI where a sane implementation in C would be two orders of magnitude less code.
Can’t say that electron does not encourage bad software, quite the opposite
Yup. VSCode is really fast and memory-frugal for an Electron application of that complexity.
Likewise, Gnome has proven that you can write entire UIs in Javascript and have them be quite performant.
Electron (well, Node is a big sub-culprit) and Javascript in general just make it really easy to create a slow, bloated application.
Always has been.
Claude code is react and their desktop app is Electron. But “coding is largely a solved problem”.
> shipping as electron apps that implement a TUI layer as their front-end
A significant number of these apps are nodejs apps so it’s not that much of a leap!
Yeah, I noticed some TUI libraries in npm when I was working on a Typescript project a couple of years back so I'm sure people are doing it.
I really wish that 1Password wasn’t an electron app. Or Spotify. (Maybe I should just use Spotify in the browser).
We need to advocate and evangelize for native apps, like RapidApi on macOS and also Tower.
Just wait till you hear about the wonders of React + Ink! Now you can have JS bloat in your terminal too!
Jokes aside, I don't understand how devs can bring themselves to ship such inefficient apps.
Except most of the TUIs I’m seeing are god awful with horrible input latency because they’ve reimplemented everything from scratch in python or whatever. Multiple hundreds of ms per keystroke: it sucks.
Bad UI plagued software development since ages immortal. The reason is not AI. Good UI design is a skill (or art?) and not an afterthought. But most people do not see it that way and that is why things are the way they are.
No, it's just misaligned incentives.
Companies make UI/UX to prioritise first 30 minutes of the experience, to keep user using it long enough that they stick with it. Not the 8h/day work the UI will get when a tool become pillar of your work.
> since ages immortal
since time immemorial?
3rd Sept 1189.
Anything after that is time memorial I guess.
FYI this is why I still use Vim sometimes. I am OOM more productive in JetBrains, but sometimes I have to feel like Hiro Protagonist. So, Vim it is.
Sometimes I swear that people are just making up acronyms here to troll people.
I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory". I have never seen the former used as an acronym before, let alone without some kind of contextual clue. (In typical Baader-Meinhof fashion, I'm sure I'll see it again in the next 24 hours...)
> I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory".
I mean they mentioned Jetbrains, it could be either.
Nailed it!
I have just combined those together. I use astronvim as main editor but when I need IDE I switch to Idea. I use ideavim with configuration as close as possible to astronvim. So text editing is the same for me in both programs. Modal editors are still great and they can do a lot of work that looks like magic for AI era trained developers.
Did Hiro even use a keyboard? I remember everything was VR in Snow Crash.
I, of course, pretend I'm Zero Cool.
I’m relatively certain it’s just this at the end of the day. Everything I see people doing in their custom built TUIs or claude/codex CLI can be done, likely even easier, in a simplified IDE or easier to scan UI, but it feels nice/cool/cyberpunk/work-like to look like you’re doing more.
Everyone will have a “reasonable” explanation though for why they have to stay in the terminal even when they aren’t really coding anymore and it wouldn’t be hard to have a window next to your terminal if you really have to, but live and let live. Whatever makes you happy as be all become managers.
I too like a cyberpunk interface even if it’s last the need :)
It is much easier to quickly generate a usable tui for simple monitoring and management than a usable gui. Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two - much faster to compile and no platform specific issues. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window
> I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window
I do a lot of work in the terminal and that's exactly why I'd rather have other windows to the side so that my terminal can stay exactly focused on what I'm doing there. Those other windows might also be terminals, but I have a big screen, and I want to make use of it to see things all at once. A GUI gives far more flexibility for arranging those multiple views.
I've sat with coworkers taking two to twelve keystrokes to flip between things that I just have side by side in separate IDE windows, browser windows, or tabs... or can switch between with a single click instead of those keystrokes.
This used to not be the case - we've regressed. In the distant past you could just drag a couple of widgets onto a form and update them from a timer.
Not anymore it isn't. "Claude, make this a web app".
TUIs already increased in popularity before agents became a thing. The low latency, the ease of remoting and the limited screen real estate which forces the developer to carefully design the interface are genuine advantages. I've been using mutt, vim, tig, tmux, newsboat, etc for over a decade at this point, and the cyberpunk feeling faded quickly.
No it can never be the same. The terminal is about not having to switch from the keyboard. My entire workflow is tmux panes with different TUIs and terminals. Not to mention performance, with a neovim IDE you may have tens of them open in different panes for example. I wouldn't try that with VSCode.
It isn't, at least for me. I choose between GUI and terminal apps based on which one is easies. Sometimes the "easy" option really isn't easy at all.
But GUIs are hard to built - mainly because of tech debts around all three major platforms. But nontheless displaying graphics is harder than outputting control chars.
Hot take: TUI’s default to providing utility, GUI’s are prone to extra style/bloat.
Obviously both are capable of the other.
The vanilla HTML styles look bare, so you have do _something_. TUI’s look sort of cool in their simplest form.
I don’t understand why developers aren’t just learning to use CLIs and be comfortable with terminals even without cute little interfaces.
Are people really that put off by seeing some text on a screen and nothing more? Is tmux that difficult to learn?
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.
I would try switching to Auto Mode which is their own recommendation as a safer alternative to that but still avoids needing to confirm actions endlessly: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode
I’d love to. It’s not available to Claude Pro nor Claude Max subscribers. Eventually I got fed up with waiting and just turned off permissions.
I associate CLI prompt and typing 100wpm and lots of scrolling logs with l33t, but claude code is more 1992 DOS program vibes.
CLI makes a lot more sense than TUI to me. A TUI program feels like a new thing to learn, a CLI program is just a new tool in my toolbox.
I can see some point to having an auto-updating dashboard or the like, though.
Thank you for this comment. As a principal engineer in FAANG, this the correct answer
I thought that that was the case for me, but then I tried using Claude Code through the desktop app last week and it was so bad. Slow, glitchy... I went back to the TUI in no time.
Can it be much more simple of a reason and that tuis fit into many of our existing tmux based work flows?
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!
I mean, I guess there's that novelty for the first few years of your career. I've been doing this a decade. I don't care about looking and feeling like a l33t h4xx0r and I doubt my peers do either.
TUIs just solve the right problems in the same world we're already working in - the terminal. That they're fast to launch and terminals have modern features like rich color and mouse support just adds to that.
"Claude, write a set of scripts using bash and python that trade this $10,000 on S&P 500 listed stocks until it reaches 5 million, make no mistakes"
lol most depressing comment of the day