44 ms·

It's wild how much these agent interfaces have aligned UI-wise. There's almost zero difference between all of them.

by jjcm 2mo ago

overgard 2mo ago
It's kind of bizarre in that it's not like this is an optimal interface, either. I mean, it's fine, but why not try something different? I also don't really get why TUI's have become such a big deal, other than maybe nerd bait. The only time I want a TUI is when I'm SSH'd into a machine, which isn't very often? TUI's have so many downsides. Selecting text is inconsistent, copy paste is inconsistent, mouse behaviors.. it's all kind of jagged.
- seunosewa 2mo ago
  The SSH into machine market is huge. Cloud work, Dedicated servers, VPS, Colab.
  - bryanlarsen 2mo ago
    Even bigger could be sandboxes. It's certainly possible to sandbox your agents and still use a GUI, but SSH is the easiest way. And not sandboxing your agents seems insane.
  - RussianCow 2mo ago
    There's no reason you couldn't present a GUI over an SSH connection. Whether the agent is running locally or remotely is orthogonal to the type of interface used.
    - esseph 2mo ago
      Most of us sshing in would be very annoyed by the GUI and associated overhead and latency. "Why doesn't this exist?“ Because people don't want it at scale.
- dionian 2mo ago
  maybe im in the minority but i take one look at these things and see its a desktop gui and lose interest, because i use TUI heavily on my work machine, and one advantage is that i can work remotely from any location to monitor long running jobs or get work done when im not at a computer.
- mystifyingpoi 2mo ago
  > The only time I want a TUI is when I'm SSH'd into a machine Well, that's your need and it is fine. For me, I want TUIs all the time for everything. They blend really nice with... well, all the other TUI tools I already use all the time.
- horsawlarway 2mo ago
  I'll take this bait. First up - I completely agree that parts of the terminal experience are decidedly lackluster, you can make them "fine" but the general experience doesn't align with consistent OS principles users are familiar with, and I agree that good mouse support, expected copy and paste, selection behaviors, adding files/attachments to prompts, etc... all could be better (and actually are mostly better on decent modern terminals, as an aside) But... And this is the big but... LLMs are basically text IO systems. And terminals are designed from the ground up to allow text IO to control the entire system, including the TUI (ex - multiplayer agent tmux is a fun demo). It's a genuinely powerful pairing, and basically ALL of the non-TUI systems basically end up just embedding a terminal [cough* xterm *cough] and becoming a non-standard TUI themselves, anyways. So TUIs have become a big deal because it's the obvious and easy way to give an LLM "computer use" skills, without spending a fortune on tokens doing graphical processing for GUIs, which are geared towards humans and not agents, and are generally less powerful anyways.
potatoproduct 2mo ago
Nobody gets fired largely copying eachother. Releasing something new and risky often isn't worth it, sadly.
SwellJoe 2mo ago
I did a review of all of them recently (OK, there are way too many to review all...but, all the official and semi-official ones), and my favorites were Reasonix and MiMo Code, partly because they're the least like Claude Code, while everyone else is a mostly direct copy. Reasonix is not great on all fronts, but it shows how much money you've spent at all times, it's fast, it's not a direct copy of Claude Code, and it is designed specifically to maximize DeepSeek caching, so it's free real estate...like a buck a day to use DeepSeek models hard. MiMo Code is just cute as hell. It's got (mostly tasteful) animations and emojis and such, it's fun to use. It also is not a direct copy of Claude Code. It almost feels like a GUI app. MiMo Pro is an underappreciated model, too, at least for some classes of problem. It's very good at security vulnerability research, and very cheap. It's slower than DeepSeek and more easily confused by tools, but it's uncannily good at reading code and identifying security bugs (rough parity with Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 at more than an order of magnitude lower price); and with fewer false positives than most models, including the frontiers. And, to keep it on topic, Antigravity refuses security work of any sort, so it's unfit for purpose. Gemini 3.6 Flash is pretty good at security work via the API, so it's not the model rejecting, it's the agent, which is extra annoying.
jnpnj 2mo ago
When NLP is the interface the natural reflex is to cut the visual interface.

It's wild how much these agent interfaces have aligned UI-wise. There's almost zero difference between all of them.

by jjcm 2mo ago

It's wild how much these agent interfaces have aligned UI-wise. There's almost zero difference between all of them.

It's kind of bizarre in that it's not like this is an optimal interface, either. I mean, it's fine, but why not try something different? I also don't really get why TUI's have become such a big deal, other than maybe nerd bait. The only time I want a TUI is when I'm SSH'd into a machine, which isn't very often? TUI's have so many downsides. Selecting text is inconsistent, copy paste is inconsistent, mouse behaviors.. it's all kind of jagged.

seunosewa 2mo ago
The SSH into machine market is huge. Cloud work, Dedicated servers, VPS, Colab.
- bryanlarsen 2mo ago
  Even bigger could be sandboxes. It's certainly possible to sandbox your agents and still use a GUI, but SSH is the easiest way. And not sandboxing your agents seems insane.
- RussianCow 2mo ago
  There's no reason you couldn't present a GUI over an SSH connection. Whether the agent is running locally or remotely is orthogonal to the type of interface used.
  - esseph 2mo ago
    Most of us sshing in would be very annoyed by the GUI and associated overhead and latency. "Why doesn't this exist?“ Because people don't want it at scale.
dionian 2mo ago
maybe im in the minority but i take one look at these things and see its a desktop gui and lose interest, because i use TUI heavily on my work machine, and one advantage is that i can work remotely from any location to monitor long running jobs or get work done when im not at a computer.
mystifyingpoi 2mo ago
> The only time I want a TUI is when I'm SSH'd into a machine Well, that's your need and it is fine. For me, I want TUIs all the time for everything. They blend really nice with... well, all the other TUI tools I already use all the time.
horsawlarway 2mo ago
I'll take this bait. First up - I completely agree that parts of the terminal experience are decidedly lackluster, you can make them "fine" but the general experience doesn't align with consistent OS principles users are familiar with, and I agree that good mouse support, expected copy and paste, selection behaviors, adding files/attachments to prompts, etc... all could be better (and actually are mostly better on decent modern terminals, as an aside) But... And this is the big but... LLMs are basically text IO systems. And terminals are designed from the ground up to allow text IO to control the entire system, including the TUI (ex - multiplayer agent tmux is a fun demo). It's a genuinely powerful pairing, and basically ALL of the non-TUI systems basically end up just embedding a terminal [cough* xterm *cough] and becoming a non-standard TUI themselves, anyways. So TUIs have become a big deal because it's the obvious and easy way to give an LLM "computer use" skills, without spending a fortune on tokens doing graphical processing for GUIs, which are geared towards humans and not agents, and are generally less powerful anyways.

potatoproduct 2mo ago

Nobody gets fired largely copying eachother. Releasing something new and risky often isn't worth it, sadly.

SwellJoe 2mo ago

I did a review of all of them recently (OK, there are way too many to review all...but, all the official and semi-official ones), and my favorites were Reasonix and MiMo Code, partly because they're the least like Claude Code, while everyone else is a mostly direct copy. Reasonix is not great on all fronts, but it shows how much money you've spent at all times, it's fast, it's not a direct copy of Claude Code, and it is designed specifically to maximize DeepSeek caching, so it's free real estate...like a buck a day to use DeepSeek models hard. MiMo Code is just cute as hell. It's got (mostly tasteful) animations and emojis and such, it's fun to use. It also is not a direct copy of Claude Code. It almost feels like a GUI app. MiMo Pro is an underappreciated model, too, at least for some classes of problem. It's very good at security vulnerability research, and very cheap. It's slower than DeepSeek and more easily confused by tools, but it's uncannily good at reading code and identifying security bugs (rough parity with Opus 4.8/GPT 5.5 at more than an order of magnitude lower price); and with fewer false positives than most models, including the frontiers. And, to keep it on topic, Antigravity refuses security work of any sort, so it's unfit for purpose. Gemini 3.6 Flash is pretty good at security work via the API, so it's not the model rejecting, it's the agent, which is extra annoying.

jnpnj 2mo ago

When NLP is the interface the natural reflex is to cut the visual interface.