--- title: Stop Making TUIs | daily.dev description: An opinionated argument that developers should stop building terminal user interfaces (TUIs) now that AI coding agents make native GUI development fast and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/stop-making-tuis-m5mybfkns twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Stop Making TUIs | daily.dev og:description: An opinionated argument that developers should stop building terminal user interfaces (TUIs) now that AI coding agents make native GUI development fast and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/stop-making-tuis-m5mybfkns og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/M5mybFKNS.png og:image:alt: Stop Making TUIs og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Stop Making TUIs **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 15 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary An opinionated argument that developers should stop building terminal user interfaces (TUIs) now that AI coding agents make native GUI development fast and cheap. The author shares a string of AI-generated SwiftUI apps built for personal use (a markdown viewer, a SageMath frontend, a music player with an embedded LLM agent, a self-driving wiki, a food tracker, a temperature monitor, and an Apple TV remote) and argues that TUI frameworks like Ratatui, Textual, and Bubbletea will always lag native UI toolkits on scrolling, drag-and-drop, text selection, and accessibility. Common pro-TUI arguments (density, SSH access, accessibility, cross-platform reach) are each addressed and largely dismissed, while CLIs are defended as still worthwhile. The author recommends specific SwiftUI/Swift 'skills' for coding agents and a Makefile-based build process to avoid Xcode. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why are TUI frameworks like Ratatui, Textual, and Bubbletea limited compared to native GUI frameworks? Even with a good TUI framework, developers end up fighting the terminal to approximate what native frameworks provide out of the box, such as smooth scrolling, drag and drop, text selection, multiple floating windows, and image handling. Standard controls like date pickers or progress bars can be built in an hour but rarely match native widget quality or compose as well. _Developers weighing terminal versus native UI tradeoffs can track takes like this on daily.dev._ ### Are terminal user interfaces actually more accessible than graphical interfaces? No, TUIs are often worse for accessibility than modern GUIs. Screen readers can end up reading raw line-by-line chrome updates like repeated hash marks and dashes as a TUI redraws, whereas frameworks such as SwiftUI maintain a separate semantic accessibility tree alongside the visual tree, designed for accessibility from the start. _Anyone weighing interface choices with accessibility in mind can follow this kind of analysis on daily.dev._ ### How can AI coding agents help build a native macOS SwiftUI app without using Xcode? An agent-driven workflow can rely on a Makefile-based build process instead of opening Xcode, paired with skills such as a macOS design skill, a SwiftUI skill, and a Swift language style skill for idiomatic code. Enabling computer-use style tooling lets the agent see and drive the running app, so it can be launched, tested, and debugged with minimal manual intervention. _Developers experimenting with agent-driven native app workflows can find similar approaches on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 3 discussions and 859 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-08-22). **TL;DR:** Reaction skews skeptical to outright dismissive: many argue LLMs are bad at UI/UX design and that the post's tone is grandiose, while a large parallel debate defends TUIs for their portability, remote-access, keyboard-driven workflows, and terminal multiplexing benefits that the author allegedly dismissed too easily. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 25% mixed · 60% skeptical **The case for** - Some acknowledge AI-generated GUIs can be 'good enough' for small personal utility apps. - A few agree the terminal's underlying VT100-era protocols are a genuine limitation worth rethinking. - Some like the idea of native apps being cheap enough now to build one-off personal tools. **The pushback** - Many argue LLMs are actually bad at producing coherent, well-designed UI/UX despite looking flashy in demos. - Several found the post's tone (e.g., 'screenshot this and give it to Claude') condescending or out of touch. - TUI defenders note strengths the piece downplays: SSH/remote access, tmux/screen session persistence, low bandwidth, keyboard-first workflows, and accessibility for people who struggle with a mouse. - GUI cross-platform frameworks are criticized as inconsistent, heavy (Electron/web), or looking bad outside their 'native' platform. - Some say TUIs don't run well on mobile/Android, undercutting one of the post's own portability claims in reverse. **By community** - lobsters (skeptical): Commenters largely reject the claim that AI produces well-designed UIs, calling the post's reasoning and tone overblown, with pushback even against a defender's counterexample. - hackernews (heated): A long, contentious back-and-forth pits TUI defenders (remote access, tmux persistence, keyboard efficiency, low resource use) against those favoring native/cross-platform GUIs, with side debates on reinventing terminal protocols. **Hottest debate:** Whether TUIs' practical advantages (SSH/remote sessions, tmux persistence, keyboard-driven speed, low resource use) outweigh their accessibility and mouse/UI limitations compared to native or web GUIs. **Open questions** - Can a redesigned terminal protocol actually deliver GUI-level accessibility, scrolling, and selection without losing what makes terminals lightweight and portable? - Is there a cross-platform GUI framework that is simultaneously fast, good developer experience, and visually consistent, given commenters couldn't agree one exists? - How well do AI-generated GUIs actually hold up for anything beyond toy/personal-use apps? **Highlights** > > But building good UI is very hard: this kind of code is tedious, repetitive, exacting, and gated by platform conceptual knowledge. It takes years to get good at this kind of work.Which is why I would never hand-write this program. Instead, I summoned it. And here they lost me, as LLMs are also **not** good at making well designed coherent user interfaces. They make slick looking prototypes and demo material but actually making a good UI with good UX takes a holistic approach and a visual understanding LLMs fundamentally do not have. It is already difficult to make them adhere to the same patterns and practices in the area they are good in (code). Anyway, that is where the author lost me. I did continue reading a bit but the article reads a bit like a feverish ramble as it jumps all over the place with things like this > I’m not packaging this application up. If you want it, just screenshot this section of the post and give it to Claude. It’ll build something useful. You see where I’m going with this. No I am not, you just went on a tangent about something and then make a sudden statement about not packaging it up. There is all sorts of assumed context and subtext the author takes for granted that is not being introduced. [It honestly reads a bit like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nTpsv9PNqo) > — [creesch on lobsters · 23 points, 3 comments](https://lobste.rs/s/kyb21s/stop_making_tuis#c_svhb62) > Again, the author made a more complex argument. One I included as quote. Again, I am not arguing about models being able to do "good enough", I know they can. > I presented my screenshot as a counter-point. But if you insist, from your screenshot alone: - Too many different font sizes for visually similar elements. - Alignment of elements is inconsistent - Missing information about what various values mean: - Your total down and up seems to be less than what is shown in the per process bandwidth. Could be alright, but does not become clear by just looking at it. - Similar, there are 31 connections, 3 LAN connections yet further down the block with LAN / Local is empty. This is either an error or they have different meaning that is not made clear by the interface. Just some things that stand out at first glance. Yes, for a personal app it is likely good enough. However, a human with two functional eyeballs and a little bit eye for detail could already have made improvements on this if we wanted to take it further. The argument that you get a highly more superior UI by just summoning it, **as the author quite literally says** is simply false and ridiculous. Which is also why I stand by what I am saying. The author wrote what they wrote and that simply does not hold up. There is really no need to defend this fever dream of a blog post simply because it is about AI usage. Sometimes a bad article is just a bad article. > — [creesch on lobsters · 1 points](https://lobste.rs/s/kyb21s/stop_making_tuis#c_myv9p4) > Ratatui is such great work. The New Terminal, the complete break from VT100, is I think the most powerful rebuttal to what I'm saying about TUIs. My take is that the Morlocks should pack everything that is great about TUIs (and there are great things about them) and move them upstairs to live alongside the Eloi in GUI-land. Let 1000 Bloomberg terminal interfaces bloom. But there's another even more ambitious take on this, which is to take everything that's pleasant and good about Eloi world and bring it down into the Morlock caves. I don't think you can accomplish that so long as you're drawing interfaces with punctuation characters, but there's nothing to say a terminal has to work that way; you can have a terminal with rich out-of-band-signaled UI. Not just, like, Kitty graphics, but something more like a real terminal that is meant from day 1 to work with all the complexity of a Bloomberg terminal. You could have had it in 2010, but it's a king hell mess to put together, and you'd sort of assume nobody was going to use it (because it's a break from VT100 compatibility). But that doesn't matter anymore! We are the music makers, &c &c. I think a lot of very smart people assume we're going to build up from VT100 to something incrementally but significantly better (Ghostty is already materially better than anything I'd used prior). But I hope those people eventually set their sights higher. > — [tptacek on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401520) > Hard disagree. Make more TUIs! TUIs have downsides like accessibility, poor mouse support, but work really well if you focus on keyboard input. It is a better/faster input mode to begin with, especially for power users, but also for average people; you'd be surprised at how much more user-friendly an arrow-keys driven UI can be vs modern web interfaces. I've been building my own TUI framework [1] and getting amazing results. Good TUIs are more of a GUI than a dumb text terminal. If we had a cross-platform usable GUI framework, and more consistency across OSes, the story would be different. [1] https://github.com/ricardobeat/milktea > — [ricardobeat on hackernews · 10 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401179) > You know what's awesome about TUIs? They live in a tab in my terminal. 95% of the time, my system has three windows open: terminal, browser, Signal. Please, make more TUIs and web apps, so they can live in my terminal or my browser. > — [JoshTriplett on hackernews · 13 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384928) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/kyb21s/stop_making_tuis) · 8 points · 20 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384210) · 283 points · 837 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49380033) · 6 points · 2 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Why TUIs are back by Alcides Fonseca](https://daily.dev/posts/why-tuis-are-back-by-alcides-fonseca-kzt8sv2vd) · Lobsters · 84 upvotes · 3 comments --- Tags: [#cli](https://daily.dev/tags/cli), [#mac](https://daily.dev/tags/mac), [#swiftui](https://daily.dev/tags/swiftui), [#vibe-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/vibe-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/stop-making-tuis-m5mybfkns) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Stop Making TUIs","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/stop-making-tuis-m5mybfkns","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/stop-making-tuis-m5mybfkns"},"datePublished":"2026-08-22T15:53:07.941Z","dateModified":"2026-08-22T20:56:20.940Z","description":"An opinionated argument that developers should stop building terminal user interfaces (TUIs) now that AI coding agents make native GUI development fast and...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--0_ODbtD2--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2008","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--0_ODbtD2--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2008","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Lobsters","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Lobsters","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--tl8v_Fku--/f_auto,t_logo/v1698841318/logos/lobste.jpg","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/stop-making-tuis-m5mybfkns","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"cli,mac,swiftui,vibe-coding","timeRequired":"PT15M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Lobsters","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Stop Making TUIs"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/stop-making-tuis-m5mybfkns#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"Why are TUI frameworks like Ratatui, Textual, and Bubbletea limited compared to native GUI frameworks?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Even with a good TUI framework, developers end up fighting the terminal to approximate what native frameworks provide out of the box, such as smooth scrolling, drag and drop, text selection, multiple floating windows, and image handling. 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