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Thomas Ptacek Argued Coding Agents Removed the Last Excuse for Building TUIs
Ptacek's 'Stop Making TUIs', posted 2026-08-20 and now at 407 points with 519 comments, argues that terminal UIs force developers to reimplement scrolling, drag-and-drop, text selection, multiple windows and image handling that native frameworks give for free, and that screen readers handle them badly, reading updates as 'hash mark, hash mark, hash mark, dash, dash'. His newest argument is the AI one: agents like Claude and Codex have dissolved the skill boundary that made native GUI work feel out of reach, so the cost argument for TUIs no longer holds. The thread is notable because agent CLIs are themselves the current TUI boom.
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