Stop Making TUIs
Coding agents have made building native GUIs cheap enough to replace throwaway CLIs
“If you haven't tried your hand at turning one of your 500 throwaway CLIs into a native app, you're doing yourself a disservice. Go build a native UI. It'll probably change the way you think.”
Thomas Ptacek argues that coding agents have reduced the cost of building native GUIs to near-zero, making TUIs and CLIs unnecessary for personal tools. Simon Willison echoes this, citing his own vibe-coded macOS menu bar apps as daily drivers. The practical implication is a shift in developer defaults: the friction barrier that kept developers in the terminal is largely gone.