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Comment by amrrs | Hacker News Reader

If at all anything, Claude Code's success disproved this

It's actually an interesting example, because unlike Warp that tries to be a CLI with AI, Claude defaults to the AI (unless you prefix with an exclamation mark). Maybe it says more about me, but I now find myself asking Claude to write for me even relatively short sed/awk invocations that would have been faster to type by hand. The uncharitable interpretation is that I'm lazy, but the charitable one I tell myself is that I don't want to context-switch and prefer to keep my working memory at the higher level problem.

In any case, Claude Code is not really CLI, but rather a conversational interface.

Claude Code is a TUI (with "text"), not a CLI (with "command line"). The very point of CC is that you can replace a command line with human-readable texts.

Let's not be overly reductive, Claude Code is a TUI with a CLI for all input including slash commands.

You may think that's pedantic but it really isn't. Half-decent TUIs are much closer to GUIs than they are to CLIs because they're interactive and don't suffer from discoverability issues like most CLIs do. The only similarity they have with CLIs is that they both run in a terminal emulator.

"htop" is a TUI, "ps" is a CLI. They can both accomplish most of the same things but the user experience is completely different. With htop you're clicking on columns to sort the live-updating process list, while with "ps" you're reading the manual pages to find the right flags to sort the columns, wrapping it in a "watch" command to get it to update periodically, and piping into "head" to get the top N results (or looking for a ps flag to do the same).

Claude Code is a Terminal User Interface, not a Command Line Interface.

Well, it is if you just run

claude -p "Question goes here"

As that will print the answer only and exit.

But that's not how it's typically used, it's predominantly used in TUI mode so the popularity of CC doesn't tell us anything about popularity of the CLI.

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