Stop Making TUIs
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
Thomas Ptacek says stop shipping tiny CLIs and make native apps instead. Coding agents have made small GUIs cheap enough that the old excuse is wearing thin.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Thomas Ptacek is pushing a simple idea: for a lot of personal tools, the right answer is no longer a terminal interface. If even a throwaway script can be turned into a native app without much pain, then the default should change. That’s the argument he’s making, and it’s a pretty blunt one.
Simon Willison says the advice hit close to home. He already wrote about two macOS task bar apps he made with vibe coding back in March, one for bandwidth and one for GPU monitoring, and he still uses both every day. That matters because this isn’t theory from a distance. It’s a working example of a tiny tool crossing over into something more polished and more useful.
The bigger point is not that CLIs are bad. It’s that the cost of trying a native UI has dropped enough that a lot of people may be avoiding it out of habit, not necessity. Willison says he’s not yet routinely replacing his other projects’ command lines with real interfaces. But he also says he’s running out of excuses.
And that’s the neat pressure point here. If coding agents really have made usable-enough GUI work nearly effortless, then the old “a terminal is simpler” reflex starts to look like inertia dressed up as discipline. Ptacek’s message is basically: try it once and see what changes.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the rare anti-TUI take that doesn’t sound like startup theater. A lot of developers still worship the command line because it feels efficient, but sometimes it’s just a nice little barrier keeping a tool from being useful to a human. The agent era is making that excuse a bit embarrassing, which is healthy.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog
