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Comment by GreenSalem | Hacker News Reader

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GreenSalem

Incoherent and far too long .

Lists a bunch of things .

Fails to make any clear points .

Fails to give real reasons for the few claims it makes .

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But it makes some things very clear:

- All those GUI windows look the same. How the fuck do I tell one app from the other?

- The abysmal corner radii are a clear indication of terminal macOS. Pun fully intended.

I really liked this article (despite disagreeing with its conclusion and agreeing with many of the concerns about failures of TUIs). It gave a feeling of "here's a bunch of cool stuff I've done" to help back the claim, which is far more personal than a lot of blog posts tend to be.

Except there was nothing "cool" about them. Vibe-coding ugly looking GUIs with slop-code backends is not interesting or impressive in 2026. Literally anyone can do it, and I'm pretty sure 90% of HN readers are aware that it's possible. Plus it did nothing to further the claimed purpose of the article, which was to explain why you shouldn't make TUIs.

Building software for yourself - and only yourself - is a super-power.

I can see how LLMs help.

I wouldn't want to maintain software for other people entirely vibe coded. I think I might think again about native app development for my own needs, if it's kind of disposable.

Did you read it all the way to the end? It's coherent and does give real if debatable reasons for the claims it makes, I think it also does so quite clearly although if I'd written it the ordering of the sections would be different.

Here's an organically grown summary:

• TUIs suck because they are primitive, often buggy, hard to write and aren't accessible. Their existence isn't due to any real technical advantage but more because UNIX historically had a very bad UI toolkit (Motif) which established a 'culture' of TUIs.

• It's now easy (on macOS) to write native apps that use SwiftUI and give a much better GUI. You can just vibe code them.

• Some specific skills, features, templates etc are linked which look useful if you agree with this approach.

• You don't have to give up remote access because there's no reason the GUI has to run on the same machine as the thing it controls. A native GUI can just SSH in to a remote machine and run non-TUI CLI tools to control it. Lots of apps have worked this way and it functions fine.

• On the other hand, TUIs are portable (ish). The author concedes this may sometimes be useful.

> Did you read it all the way to the end? It's coherent ...

I prefer my articles to be coherent without having to wade through pages worth of irrelevant material.

Spent 2 minutes skimming, didn't manage to find a single talking point. I've no idea what the thesis is. Seemed like a list of things this person built.

People talk shit about LLM writing. Well, here's a prime example of why I like LLM-speak. Does this article have personality? Yes. Attitude? Yes. Is it structured and accessible? No.

I'll take clarity over personality any day of the week.

That's a false dichotomy. If you launder rambling pointless prose through the llm you don't trade the personality of the writing for a well reasoned argument with clear points, you just lost the personality and gained shitty writing. LLMs aren't magic and can't make your point for you if you don't have one to begin with in the prompt. Garbage in garbage out.

I disagree. An editor can definitely make a piece of writing clearer without further input from the author. I often use an LLM to do that.

Of course, I didn't mean to imply that there's a dichotomy between personality and clarity. There's a dichotomy between ordinary LLM writing and personality.

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