Thomas Ptacek: Stop writing TUIs, agents make native UIs cheaper

The terminal is no longer a shortcut for internal tools

Thomas Ptacek suggests on his blog abandoning the habit of building dozens of disposable terminal user interfaces (TUIs) for personal or small corporate tools. According to him, the cost of creating a native application has dropped so much that it makes no sense to stick to the command line where it is not strictly necessary.

Simon Willison joins him with his own experience from March. He admits that while he hasn't yet started immediately dropping real graphical interfaces into all his projects, he is gradually running out of excuses not to.

The default path changes for developer comfort

Until recently, a simple rule applied: if you need to solve something for yourself or your team, pass parameters in the terminal. Building a GUI for a text processing script meant losing several hours, while a shell script was done instantly.

However, AI agents (whether in the form of Cursor, Claude, or Copilot) can now generate a functional and visually acceptable interface in a fraction of the original time. The developer math, where TUI won thanks to writing efficiency, no longer works for many scenarios. A native interface is no longer the privilege of customer products.

An agent does not guarantee perfect ergonomics

The view of Ptacek and Willison is enthusiastic, but it has an obvious flaw. Agents can quickly generate the skeleton of an application, but they often fail at the fine-tuning of ergonomics, which a TUI forces through its very limitations.

A quickly glued-together native GUI may look good at first glance, but if you use it daily, minor errors in responsiveness or element logic will start to interfere more than the need to remember a few parameters in the terminal.

The decline of TUIs will show the real utility of AI

The signal of change will not be that everyone suddenly deletes their bash profiles. The crucial metric will be the decline in new small TUI projects among senior developers who have so far written everything via CLI. Once this group leans towards a generated GUI, it will be clear that the barrier has truly fallen.

Lilith's verdict

Developers have lost the last reason to pretend that the terminal is a better choice just because buttons take longer to code.