user interfaces are for users. people who deal with words may prefer an advanced TUI. Others may find graphical interfaces more useful. describe, don't prescribe. let a thousand flowers bloom.

TUIs are by definition keyboard first.

TUIs are a creative constraint.

TUIs are an invitation for programmers.

TUIs are doing "less" to render.

TUIs don't need to be "responsive".

Hello World is TUI.

I think OP is missing the point of TUIs: They kinda work everywhere. While I need to fuck around with a operation systems native UI libraries like WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK, etc. I can just build an app in the terminal and be fine with it running on almost all platforms.

I'd take TUI apps over electron apps everytime as long as the UX is good.

LLM agent harnesses make it possible to do: CLI, TUI, REST API, web front end + Electron, native (I do macOS first, which then makes iOS/iPadOS almost trivial, followed by Android), and if I’m feeling ambitious, Windows (native) and Linux (usually Qt).

It’s much easier for the clanker to loop on testing / improving the TUI than a real GUI. It also means it can work on the app without an API/REST/HTTP/Java/Script ball of mud in the middle.

I wonder if devs are flocking to TUIs to gatekeep against normies building apps

Making TUIs isn't the issue. Making them with JS/TS, and in general an ecosystem designed for the web, is the problem. I've used some really good TUI apps in the past, but all these new ones mostly based on web tech are just... sloppily bad. Probably because the dev would rather be in the web browser where it's naturally colorful and scripts can run wild, but mostly-static terminal is where things are currently at. And they're using LLMs, which don't have sufficient data on web-tech-in-terminal since it wasn't really a thing until now, which also ensures they will likely never gain enough data on decent patterns since almost nobody will be engineering said patterns, creating a permanently slop-ridden cycle as future models only have slop projects to learn from.

TUIs allow you to have infinitely many running in tmux and also work over ssh so there is that.

The aggressive headline is a hook which is what bloggers have to do I guess, but it doesn't need to be polarizing. The argument boils down to "If you made a TUI only because making a native app is hard, then LLM's fix that for you now".

Making GUI apps has been way too hard on all platforms since forever. Frankly I think it's gotten worse for 20 years. People started fleeing to web wrappers like Electron to escape the horrors of native UI development.

So if that was the reason why you made a TUI, take heed. LLM's can chew through UI frameworks for you.

But I solidly believe TUIs are often better than GUIs even if they were equally easy to make. They liberate your app from having to follow the fracture and fashions of GUI's - Liquid glass, Windows 8, SwiftUI, WinUI3, QT, GTK or whatever. A TUI allows muscle memory that you learned on Solaris in the 90s to work fine in windows 11 in 2026.

>> Because I assume that agents work better with a filesystem to grovel

What the what now?