Comment by reissbaker

For the Claude Code / OpenCode / Crush / etc new wave TUIs, it's not about composability or text streaming. It's basically a combination of a few tailwinds:

1. There's already a large-ish community of engineers who live in the terminal e.g. Vim/Neovim/tmux/zellij/etc users. Lots of engineering tasks are accomplished by running scripts in a terminal, so it makes sense for some people to just move as much of their work there as possible. This means there's a set of users you can address with dev tools that run in a terminal.

2. Cross-platform distribution among the platforms most of those people care about — macOS and Linux — is largely a solved problem via package managers. Distributing cross-platform native apps is fragmented at best.

3. Building modern TUIs has become a lot easier thanks to the demand+distribution wins above: there's a lot of appetite for building blocks, and so lots of good options have flourished like Ink for React, Bubble Tea for Go, etc.

4. General developer distaste for the most straightforward analogue to all of this for desktop GUIs: Electron. Deservedly or not it's associated with slow, bloated applications. And if you don't use Electron, doing cross-platform anything is going to be a much harder problem than just pushing out a quick TUI app.

Eventually successful products seem to eventually jump the gap, like Claude Code eventually spawning Claude Cowork and OpenCode adding OpenCode Web. But it's easier and faster to test product market fit for dev tools with a TUI. And plenty of your users will stay there, even after you launch something else.