> I think mostly this renaissance is partly due to the current bloat of Electron GUIs.
I think it's mostly due to the CLI being much more powerful than a full-blown IDE: when you try to make everything simple (in a menu, accessible with one mouse-click or a shortcut), then semi-advanced things (which haven't been thought of in the IDE) become impossible.
They also compose way more easily with the network: it's much easier to SSH/tmux TUIs than to try to network GUIs. That's very important in this day and age of incessant exploits and the need to run things in VMs to try to prevent exploits from pwning your entire world.
TUIs sadly doesn't entirely solve the bloat issue: look at Claude Code CLI... An Electron app because, as the Pi author mentioned, people at Anthropic thought they were writing a game. A full headless Electron app converted, on the fly, to pretend it's a TUI.
The madness is real (shitload of message of users not happy with characters shown on screen not being those saved to source files: and I've been bit by this) and the bloat issue hasn't been solved.
But in any case you cannot go back to a GUI and not have that problem of GUIs being too restrictive: invariably there shall be a need to chain several simple commands that do one thing and that excel at that one thing and that only become powerful when chained with other commands. GUIs cannot solve that.
LLMs have just proved what many knew all along: that the CLI is more powerful.
Instead of GUIs on the contrary I expect more TUIs, more command line, and more, much more, REPL usage by LLMs and by devs using LLMs.
What I do hope though is that we get more lean TUIs (like Pi by Mario Zechner, all the utils written in Rust etc.) and less madness like "headless Electron converted 60 times per second to a fake TUI".