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Comment by andrewpareles | Hacker News Reader

Just want to share our thinking on terminal-based tools!

We think in 1-2 years people will write code at a systems level, not a function level, and it's not clear to us that you can do that with text. Text-based tools like Claude Code work in our text-based-code systems today, but I think describing algorithms to a computer in the future might involve more diagrams, and terminal will not be ideal. That's our reasoning against building a tool in the terminal, but it clearly works well today, and is the simplest way for the labs to train/run terminal tool-use agents.

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Diagrams are great at providing a simplified view of things but they suck ass when it comes to providing details.

There's a reason why fully creating systems from them died 20 years ago - and it wasn't just because the code gen failed. Finding a bug in your spec when its a mess of arrows and connections can be nigh impossible.

Go image search "complex unreal blueprint".

This is completely true, and it's a really common objection.

I don't imagine people will want to fully visualize codebases in a giant unified diagram, but I find it hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews that at least stray from plaintext in some way.

I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

Terminals aren't too far away from evolving [0] beyond UTF-8 characters. Therefore I suspect IDEs and CLIs will continue their turf wars as always.

> hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews

100% agreed here.

Disclosure: I'm the author of the project below.

[0] https://terminal.click

FYI, this is currently a dead link - wasn't sure if typo, so googled and confirmed, looks like you're down at the moment. Hopefully not a painful fix on a Sunday.

> I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

Sounds exactly like what DeepWiki is doing from the Devin AI Agent guys: https://deepwiki.com

You have lost all connection to reality.

Hey by the way I hear all communication between people is going to shift to pictograms soon. You know -- emoji and hieroglyphs. Text just isn't ideal, you know

Every system can be translated can be translated to text though. If there is one thing LLMs have essentially always been good at, it is processing written language.

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