5 ms·
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
by schmorptron 5mo ago
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
- dbish 5mo agoI’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 :)
- allthetime 5mo agoIt 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
- tempaccount5050 5mo agoNot anymore it isn't. "Claude, make this a web app".
- allthetime 5mo agoJust what I need! A bloated react app to manage my systemd units
- tempaccount5050 5mo agoSo just tell it html only if you want.
- sophiabits 5mo agoA browser is OOM more expensive to run than a terminal app, regardless of what you're running inside said browser
- eVeechu7 5mo agoIs that because they are much more likely to pay the ultimate price at the hands of the OOM killer?
- vineyardmike 5mo agoI've literally never met anyone in real life who used a computer that didn't already have a browser running 24/7
- allthetime 5mo agoHow does the browser interact with the os? A tui exe has direct access. With “only html” now we need a server of some kind. How is multiple layers and running processes superior to a thin terminal based wrapper around the relevant io? That said, obviously it depends on the use case. I’m not going to make a tui to interact with locations on a map - a web app makes a lot of sense in that case. But something like lazydocker makes sense more sense as a light terminal based program
- logicprog 5mo agoJust use something like Tk or wxWidgets.
- majormajor 5mo ago> 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.
- kajman 5mo agoWindow managers are more flexible than multiplexers, but I also think there's a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator. Multi-monitor terminal juggling also probably loses out to GUIs, though for me it's usually IDE or Browser on one and multiplexer on the other. One big zellij session connected to multiple terminal emulators is probably the best way I could think to handle that.
- rmunn 5mo ago> a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator. Depends very much on your window manager. Tiling window managers such as Hyprland let you open multiple windows and it will automatically arrange them side-by-side. Want one of them to be 60% and the other 40%? No problem, there's a keyboard shortcut (configurable) for that. Have four windows open in a grid arrangement and want to switch between them? Just slide the mouse, no clicking needed so the movement can be as rough and imprecise as you want, OR if you don't want to take your hands off the keyboard then SUPER+arrow keys (also configurable) will move the focus to the next window in that direction. (And if you are in focus-follows-mouse mode then it also moves your mouse cursor to be in the middle of the focused window, so you won't lose window focus by accidentally bumping your mouse and moving it one pixel). Keyboard shortcuts for maximizing and un-maximizing windows, for throwing them onto other workspaces and switching between workspaces... I throw windows around my screen all the time, and rarely take my hands off the keyboard to do it. It's the fastest, most flow-like window manager experience I've found yet.
- dbish 5mo agoIt’s very easy to do the same thing in a variety of ways and simple guis are basically solved by Claude/codex for almost anything.
- pocksuppet 5mo agoThis 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.
- wild_egg 5mo agoCan get a GUI with the same prompt if you tell it to use TCL/tk instead of Go + Charm stuff
- mr_mitm 5mo agoTUIs 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.
- setr 5mo agoThe low latency and instant startup is by far the primary value add imo. Nothing else comes close. The inherent lack of UI bloat is an added bonus.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ghusto 5mo agoIt 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.
- regexorcist 5mo agoNo 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.
- logicprog 5mo agoYou can make even lighter weight and just as keyboard driven GUIs. The only downside, as you say, is them not integrating with Tmux.
- regexorcist 5mo agoProjects like opencode are making the distinction between GUI and TUI almost meaningless. And that "only" downside is a massive, deal-breaking one. At this point I only have a browser besides the terminal, and I can see that going away soon for the most part thanks to LLMs.
- james_marks 5mo agoHot 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.
- keyringlight 5mo agoIt's an aspect I've wondered about, constraints do make you consider what's essential. For example in btop (screenshot in the article) the graphs are rendered with dots at low resolution, if there was another version where those graphs were full resolution is it telling you meaningfully more?
- rmunn 5mo agoSince the dots in btop's rendering are using the Braille characters, meaning you get six dots in the space that would be taken up by one alphanumeric character, the resolution on those dots is surprisingly high. A maximized terminal on my screen is size 316x86, so that's 316×2 x 86×3 = 632x258 of "Braille dot resolution" (a term I just made up) available for the graphs. Sure, that's lower than the 2560x1600 pixel resolution of my screen, but you're entirely right to ask "Does that really matter?" The graph would be smoother with about 4x more horizontal pixels and 6x more vertical pixels to work with, but I doubt I would glean any more information at first glance.
- xiaoyu2006 5mo agoBut 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.
- smackeyacky 5mo agoThis is a recent development. VB6 could have you roll a GUI interface in minutes, so even trivial tasks could have a GUI. The tools for CDE on Unices were arguably even better but CDE never really got any momentum. That it’s tough to put together a GUI now is definitely a regression and Microsoft shooting themselves in the feet regularly over the last 25 years is squarely to blame.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoYou could whip up decently usable UI in Delphi far quicker than similar one in any TUI framework. The problem is that world went away from that and into HTML/CSS/JS/DOM mess that makes simple UI things hard and complex UI things slow and/or hard, on top of the bloat.
- jbvlkt 5mo ago[dead]
- koliber 5mo agoBad 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.
- exe34 5mo ago> since ages immortal since time immemorial?
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoNo, 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.
- bartread 5mo ago> 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.
- Suro 5mo agoConsidering the insane memory consumption of claude code running in my terminal, electron was never really the problem, bad software was the culprit all along.
- onemoresoop 5mo agoCan’t say that electron does not encourage bad software, quite the opposite
- treyd 5mo agoIt's an example of bad code that further encourages more bad code.
- Redster 5mo agoAlways has been.
- fasterik 5mo agoThe 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.
- jorvi 5mo agoYup. 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.
- dlivingston 5mo agoI 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.
- sillysaurusx 5mo agoI’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.
- ne8il 5mo agoI 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 https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-auto-mode
- sillysaurusx 5mo agoI’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.
- isityettime 5mo agoTry an external sandboxing tool. When you need to adjust the sandbox, close the agent, launch it with the new params, and resume the session. It doesn't take long to arrive at a stable configuration; for me it's mostly about rw access to the CWD, read access to other local repos, and access to Nix. Other than that I can just use YOLO modes and not sweat it. I briefly evaluated a bunch (had an LLM make a list of those that satisfied some basic criteria, then visited READMEs and websites) and chose nono. No regrets: https://nono.sh/ https://nono.sh/
- chrisweekly 5mo agoCool, 1st I've heard of nono.sh. FWIW I've been happy w smolmachines microvms.
- isityettime 5mo ago
- yokoprime 5mo agoHaving 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!
- the__alchemist 5mo agoFYI 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.
- jbvlkt 5mo agoI 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.
- arcanemachiner 5mo agoSometimes 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...)
- lucketone 5mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001905
- the__alchemist 5mo agoNailed it!
- Narishma 5mo ago> I assume you mean "orders of magnitude" and not "out of memory". I mean they mentioned Jetbrains, it could be either.
- Cpoll 5mo agoDid Hiro even use a keyboard? I remember everything was VR in Snow Crash. I, of course, pretend I'm Zero Cool.
- rubslopes 5mo agoI 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.
- zer0zzz 5mo agoCan it be much more simple of a reason and that tuis fit into many of our existing tmux based work flows?
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoI associate CLI prompt and typing 100wpm and lots of scrolling logs with l33t, but claude code is more 1992 DOS program vibes.
- bee_rider 5mo agoCLI 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.
- walrus01 5mo ago"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"
- deadbabe 5mo agoI 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?
- sghiassy 5mo agoThank you for this comment. As a principal engineer in FAANG, this the correct answer
- dominotw 5mo agolol most depressing comment of the day