Buried in here is the very nice idea of an AI dividend for CLI users - as we keep designing interfaces for LLMs directly, those interfaces are text-oriented, and afford us a look at a future with the command line being central.
I like that. My recent tools are mostly AI first, and therefore CLI first. I’ve been toying with adding JSON modes to them, and this is undeniably useful, but I think I’ll keep JSON under flags; it’s a way to prioritize human users as well.
That is only because there is no viable platform to build similar gui-based tooling on
I don't actually think this is true. I think the issue is that the CLI is a much better paradigm if you're going to operate with text and text based commands.
LLMs excel at text, text is incredibly powerful in a cli environment.
It's not just that there's no GUI alternative, it's that the GUI itself is a bad affordance.
The only GUIs that even sort of successfully play in this space solve it by having a GUI that basically just embeds a CLI (see - all the vscode editors, antigravity, etc..).