Comment by jappgar
6 days ago
Terminal UIs is such a step backward. It's only attractive to people who have a preexisting emotional attachment to the terminal.
I should be one of those people, I guess. I love shell scripts and all the rest... but interactive terminal UIs have always sucked.
So much of what AI companies are putting out is designed to capture developer mindshare. Substantive improvements to their core product (models) are few and far between, so they release these fidgets about once a month to keep the hope alive.
From that standpoint, TUI makes sense because it obscures the process and the result enough to sucker more people into the vibe-coding money hole.
I think the way we currently work with agents, through a text context and prompts, is just a very natural fit for the terminal. It is a very simple design and makes it very easy to review the past actions of the agent and continue to guide it through new instructions. And then you can always jump into your IDE when you want to jump around the source code to review it in more detail.
On the other hand, agent integrations in IDEs seem to often add a lot more widgets for interacting with agents, and often they put the agent is in its own little tab off to the side, and I find that harder to work with.
That's why, even though I love using IDEs and have never been a big terminal person, I much prefer using Claude Code in the terminal rather than using tools like Copilot in VSCode (ignoring the code quality differences). I just find it nicer to separate the two.
The portability of being able to really easily run Claude Code in whatever directory you want, and through SSH, is a nice bonus too.
I agree that the current crop of IDE integrations really leave something to be desired.
I've been using Roocode (Cline fork) a lot recently and while it's overall great, the UI is janky and incomplete feeling. Same as Cursor and all the others.
I tried Claude Code after hearing great things and it was just Roocode with a worse UX (for me). Most of the people telling me how great it was were talking up the output as being amazing quality. I didn't notice that. I presume the lack of IDE integration makes it feel more magical. This is fun while you're vibing the "first 80%" of your product, but eventually the agents need much more hand holding and collaborative edits to keep things on track.
It is composable with all decades old Linux CLI tools, which you simply can't do with an IDE.
It also doesn't prevent you from using an IDE at all, but still fits for people with text editors like Vim who doesn't want to use IDEs.
I’d like to think it’s the most extensible format. If you prefer GUI, you can put a wrapper around it but this gives you the most flexibility.
The underlying process might be extensible, but the TUI likely isn't.
It makes sense I guess if a TUI is easier to build and ship than a GUI.
It does make we wonder why devs don't just use the TUI to vibecode a GUI and compete with Cursor...
I am not 100% sold on these CLI tools. Namely because they don’t optimize on coordination. I’d like to see a more polished AI behind the coordination based on context, memory, cost, speed, etc. It doesn’t make sense to deploy LLM to do this specific task or for me to hardcode that logic either. Right now, I’d start with o3 and delegate to other models based on strengths I perceive but I rather have all of that automated for me.