Stop Making TUIs
The author argues that developers should move away from building terminal-based user interfaces (TUIs) in favor of native graphical interfaces, facilitated by modern AI coding tools. The piece highlights the author's experience using AI to build native macOS applications for specialized tasks like math and markdown viewing.
Why it matters
This reflects a broader shift in software development where AI-assisted coding is lowering the barrier to entry for creating complex native applications.
Our field has a weird relationship with terminal and command line interfaces. The time has come to re-evaluate it.
I’m on a kick lately getting my friends to try building native user interfaces. I built my first serious Mac application a few months ago, and since then I’ve built more native UI thingies than in my entire career prior to that. Let’s take a quick tour.
This is MDV.app , the greatest Markdown viewer in the world until someone else writes a serious markdown viewer. I’ve already written a bunch about MDV and won’t wear you down with more advocacy for it. It is great, though.
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