Voices
Thomas Ptacek: 'Stop Making TUIs' — agents made native GUIs cheap enough that terminal UIs are a bad default
Ptacek argues on August 20 that developers reach for Ratatui or Textual out of habit, and that coding agents have collapsed the cost of a real native UI to the point where even a small personal tool deserves one. He shows several SwiftUI apps he built without writing most of the UI code, and takes apart the three standard TUI defenses (economical, SSH-friendly, accessible), noting graphical interfaces are unfrugal by design choice rather than necessity. Simon Willison blogmarked it the next day and tied it to his own March experiments vibe-coding macOS apps, quoting Ptacek's closing line: 'Go build a native UI. It'll probably change the way you think.'
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