Ask HN: Why are TUIs in trend?

1 point·roundabout-host··8 comments

To me, they seem to have limited graphics like CLIs but lose the composability and automation.

Because of the increased supply of managing remote devices.

The tradeoff with limited graphics is more expansive platform support.

For example, we're doing some Layer 2/Layer 1 networking processing on an embedded linux environment. We can have a nice TUI displaying average SNR, various waveforms, connection status. It's great.

Also, when you do lots of work with remote devices, having something like termscp is wonderful for file transfer.

AI coding agents made the terminal the primary surface again, and the tooling to build good TUIs finally got good at the same time

But why exactly are AI agents using the terminal? Can't they use accessibility tools to read GUIs?

Sometimes. Sometimes they can read screeshots, too.

But why waste tokens when bash (etc.) exists and many of the command line toools are configurable to what they emit when used?

I said TUI in the title, not CLI.

And

> and the tooling to build good TUIs finally got good at the same time

Was in the thing you replied to to ask

> But why exactly are AI agents using the terminal? Can't they use accessibility tools to read GUIs?

Which is what I replied to.

> To me, they seem to have limited graphics like CLIs but lose the composability and automation.

It would help the discussion if you gave examples.

TUIs have always existed, and most always had these problems. Is there any particular TUI that exists which doesn't allow for automation/composability and for which there are no good CLI alternatives?

Related from a few months ago:

Why TUIs are back

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000028

Reply on news.ycombinator.com