Maybe it's that TUIs feel manageable with an agent. They can be well scoped without a ton of effort, which at least for me makes me a tiny bit more comfortable letting them write code.
It feels like something to do with front-end development limitations. I noticed a wave of TUI applications, all written by Claude from the initial commit.
I started a golang TUI last summer with Codex Web/Cloud because it felt more like a closed loop. It was able to manage pretty well end to end.
Every additional complexity hop probably increases the attrition rate for successful development, so TUIs end up the most frequent bean to bar currently possible for hobbyists.
I really wanted an iOS app. I considered a web app, or a localhost app. Each additional hurdle (containers, packages, builds, testing, running, OSes, browser integration, computer use) feels like upping the required power of the models.
It's pretty good at building TUIs. Although it's not bad at Swift/macOS either. But really I think the problem is that we don't have a great solution right now for cross platform native UIs that isn't a WebView (or entire Chrome browser), which doesn't feel very native. But every platform has a pretty good terminal now, even Windows.
Recently I asked Claude to build a communication tool and TUI was its first proposal. When I had a similar request with ChatGPT previously, it proposed node.js, I assume because there are more examples in its training data.
The pairing of Claude and TUI doesn't seem like a coincidence to me, perhaps there are fewer moving parts that are easy to coordinate?
Maybe it's that TUIs feel manageable with an agent. They can be well scoped without a ton of effort, which at least for me makes me a tiny bit more comfortable letting them write code.
It feels like something to do with front-end development limitations. I noticed a wave of TUI applications, all written by Claude from the initial commit.
I started a golang TUI last summer with Codex Web/Cloud because it felt more like a closed loop. It was able to manage pretty well end to end.
Every additional complexity hop probably increases the attrition rate for successful development, so TUIs end up the most frequent bean to bar currently possible for hobbyists.
I really wanted an iOS app. I considered a web app, or a localhost app. Each additional hurdle (containers, packages, builds, testing, running, OSes, browser integration, computer use) feels like upping the required power of the models.
It's pretty good at building TUIs. Although it's not bad at Swift/macOS either. But really I think the problem is that we don't have a great solution right now for cross platform native UIs that isn't a WebView (or entire Chrome browser), which doesn't feel very native. But every platform has a pretty good terminal now, even Windows.
Recently I asked Claude to build a communication tool and TUI was its first proposal. When I had a similar request with ChatGPT previously, it proposed node.js, I assume because there are more examples in its training data.
The pairing of Claude and TUI doesn't seem like a coincidence to me, perhaps there are fewer moving parts that are easy to coordinate?
It’s easy then run a web server for a web UI, but it still looks better than a regular CLI