Stop Making TUIs(sockpuppet.org)
407 points by underdeserver 2 days ago | 519 comments
tl;dr: LLM-assisted coding has made building native GUIs (specifically SwiftUI on macOS) so cheap that the author built half a dozen personal apps—a Markdown viewer, music player with LLM agent, Apple TV remote, etc.—without writing UI code by hand. He argues that historical justifications for TUIs (cross-platform reach, SSH, density, accessibility) mostly don't hold up, and that developers should stop building new TUIs and default to native GUIs, driven by CLIs on the backend when remote access is needed.
HN Discussion:
  • TUIs excel for remote/SSH access and ops work where GUIs are impractical to forward
  • Keyboard-driven TUIs offer superior speed and usability for power users compared to GUIs
  • CLIs and text interfaces enable scripting and composability that GUIs cannot match
  • TUIs are portable, resource-efficient, and resistant to platform UI churn
  • ~Partial agreement — GUIs are great but no cross-platform framework exists to make them viable