Stop making terminal UIs

Building real native desktop apps doesn't take months anymore, so stop settling for clunky terminal interfaces.

A viral blog post sparked 375 points and 491 comments on Hacker News by arguing that developers should stop defaulting to text-based terminal user interfaces (TUIs). To prove the point, the author showcased a fleet of custom Mac apps—including a SageMath frontend, an Apple TV remote, and a music player—all "summoned" using frontier AI models without writing manual UI code.

Why it matters: Building native desktop interfaces used to be tedious and gated by platform knowledge, making terminal tools a popular shortcut. Now that LLMs can generate SwiftUI code and translate Python libraries directly into Swift, that excuse is gone.

Here's the gist: if an LLM can turn a simple prompt into a full Mac app with mouse controls, menu-bar access, and LaTeX rendering, text-only interfaces are no longer a fast path. They are just a limitation.

Next time you start hacking together a terminal tool, ask an LLM for a native desktop app instead.