I’m relatively certain it’s just this at the end of the day. Everything I see people doing in their custom built TUIs or claude/codex CLI can be done, likely even easier, in a simplified IDE or easier to scan UI, but it feels nice/cool/cyberpunk/work-like to look like you’re doing more.
Everyone will have a “reasonable” explanation though for why they have to stay in the terminal even when they aren’t really coding anymore and it wouldn’t be hard to have a window next to your terminal if you really have to, but live and let live. Whatever makes you happy as be all become managers.
I too like a cyberpunk interface even if it’s last the need :)
It is much easier to quickly generate a usable tui for simple monitoring and management than a usable gui. Go + lipgloss + bubble tea and a single prompt will give you whatever you need in a minute or two - much faster to compile and no platform specific issues. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window
> I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do a lot of work in the terminal still and I’d much rather stay in that context then open up yet another window
I do a lot of work in the terminal and that's exactly why I'd rather have other windows to the side so that my terminal can stay exactly focused on what I'm doing there. Those other windows might also be terminals, but I have a big screen, and I want to make use of it to see things all at once. A GUI gives far more flexibility for arranging those multiple views.
I've sat with coworkers taking two to twelve keystrokes to flip between things that I just have side by side in separate IDE windows, browser windows, or tabs... or can switch between with a single click instead of those keystrokes.
Window managers are more flexible than multiplexers, but I also think there's a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator.
Multi-monitor terminal juggling also probably loses out to GUIs, though for me it's usually IDE or Browser on one and multiplexer on the other. One big zellij session connected to multiple terminal emulators is probably the best way I could think to handle that.
> a higher floor of effort juggling multiple separate GUI programs than going between tabs and panes in a terminal emulator.
Depends very much on your window manager. Tiling window managers such as Hyprland let you open multiple windows and it will automatically arrange them side-by-side. Want one of them to be 60% and the other 40%? No problem, there's a keyboard shortcut (configurable) for that. Have four windows open in a grid arrangement and want to switch between them? Just slide the mouse, no clicking needed so the movement can be as rough and imprecise as you want, OR if you don't want to take your hands off the keyboard then SUPER+arrow keys (also configurable) will move the focus to the next window in that direction. (And if you are in focus-follows-mouse mode then it also moves your mouse cursor to be in the middle of the focused window, so you won't lose window focus by accidentally bumping your mouse and moving it one pixel). Keyboard shortcuts for maximizing and un-maximizing windows, for throwing them onto other workspaces and switching between workspaces...
I throw windows around my screen all the time, and rarely take my hands off the keyboard to do it. It's the fastest, most flow-like window manager experience I've found yet.
How does the browser interact with the os? A tui exe has direct access. With “only html” now we need a server of some kind. How is multiple layers and running processes superior to a thin terminal based wrapper around the relevant io?
That said, obviously it depends on the use case. I’m not going to make a tui to interact with locations on a map - a web app makes a lot of sense in that case. But something like lazydocker makes sense more sense as a light terminal based program
TUIs already increased in popularity before agents became a thing. The low latency, the ease of remoting and the limited screen real estate which forces the developer to carefully design the interface are genuine advantages. I've been using mutt, vim, tig, tmux, newsboat, etc for over a decade at this point, and the cyberpunk feeling faded quickly.
No it can never be the same. The terminal is about not having to switch from the keyboard. My entire workflow is tmux panes with different TUIs and terminals. Not to mention performance, with a neovim IDE you may have tens of them open in different panes for example. I wouldn't try that with VSCode.
Projects like opencode are making the distinction between GUI and TUI almost meaningless. And that "only" downside is a massive, deal-breaking one. At this point I only have a browser besides the terminal, and I can see that going away soon for the most part thanks to LLMs.
But GUIs are hard to built - mainly because of tech debts around all three major platforms. But nontheless displaying graphics is harder than outputting control chars.
You could whip up decently usable UI in Delphi far quicker than similar one in any TUI framework.
The problem is that world went away from that and into HTML/CSS/JS/DOM mess that makes simple UI things hard and complex UI things slow and/or hard, on top of the bloat.
VB6 could have you roll a GUI interface in minutes, so even trivial tasks could have a GUI.
The tools for CDE on Unices were arguably even better but CDE never really got any momentum.
That it’s tough to put together a GUI now is definitely a regression and Microsoft shooting themselves in the feet regularly over the last 25 years is squarely to blame.
It's an aspect I've wondered about, constraints do make you consider what's essential. For example in btop (screenshot in the article) the graphs are rendered with dots at low resolution, if there was another version where those graphs were full resolution is it telling you meaningfully more?
Since the dots in btop's rendering are using the Braille characters, meaning you get six dots in the space that would be taken up by one alphanumeric character, the resolution on those dots is surprisingly high. A maximized terminal on my screen is size 316x86, so that's 316×2 x 86×3 = 632x258 of "Braille dot resolution" (a term I just made up) available for the graphs. Sure, that's lower than the 2560x1600 pixel resolution of my screen, but you're entirely right to ask "Does that really matter?" The graph would be smoother with about 4x more horizontal pixels and 6x more vertical pixels to work with, but I doubt I would glean any more information at first glance.
None of the important projects or FANGs build with frameworks like that, sorry. Project management frameworks are all larp and mostly used by slow moving firms from the past.
Right, those frameworks aren't a good fit for sophisticated tech companies. They're targeted towards enterprises where software is just one component of a larger strategy. Sometimes moving slower is a better way to create shareholder value.
Press x to doubt. Moving slower is never the better way to create shareholder value unless you’re implying a million other things that are going wrong in your definition of moving faster.
“Move fast with stable infrastructure” as they say.
1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time.
2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
3. Staying focused 5 days a week for one person probably has better compounding effects for that week than a few people working part time and taking longer to get the work done with longer breaks in between “sessions”. Harder to measure of course but it’s one thing I’d be worried about. Easier to think about if you say each person works 2.5 days a week for half their pay, I’d rather just have one person.
Your points seem focused on the bottom line and short term extraction of labor from employees, versus actually building a long-term community of healthy, productive people.
Like this:
> will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
Maybe that's a good thing? [1]
I have no doubt that Meta is thinking like your four points and hiding behind "it's the corporation making the decisions, not a bunch of people at high levels", but... Ugh.
[1] Nitpick - I was speaking to a friend about a decade ago regarding their OT/IOT work in the defense industry, and they told me that they had to aggressively track every hour. The feds were punitive when it came to unreported overtime.
> the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
If you're doing work on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (which many software development efforts are) then you have to count hours anyway because you get paid based on what you bill. The fact that nothing substantial gets done in the additional 1-2 hours a day is immaterial because these arrangements are really just fringe benefits in the form of additional time off for employees. As a practical example: people working "9 hour days" with mid-afternoon on-site customer meetings and a half Friday from home certainly aren't fitting 40 hours of productivity into their week and nobody cares - everybody gets paid, the job gets done (for some value thereof), and millions of Americans stay employed. One might even argue that this is a feature since working less efficiently means more billable hours to the government and a larger economy.
you're telling me dispatchagents.ai :) (open to new names if anyone has cool ones, didn't expect anthropic to start using dispatch with their agents, naming is way too hard)
Pretty neat but as someone who commutes every day on the New York subway I hope it’s never “cracked” here. Phone usage without headphones is already annoying enough and I greatly appreciate the various people trying to take calls eventually lose service.
It’s a tough choice, is it worse to hear their phone calls, or hear 2 seconds of every bit of TikTok/Instagram feed trash. Either way, no cellular access seems a plus.
Who still calls anyway? Literally all my friends exclusively message now (on WhatsApp).
It would be really annoying if I were out of touch for the whole duration of subway trips. But in my city it works great. Here the 3 main providers pooled together and shared the installation.
The worst is not calls, it is the thousands of zombies hooked up on tiktok 24/7, of course with headphones, so completely unaware and indifferent to their environment, who block tunnels, escalators, turnstiles, etc.
In the 90s we read the paper and dumbed with our magnetic tickets. In the 00s we listened to MP3s while playing snake on an oyster. In the 10s we played Andy birds and listened to iTunes with a credit card at the turnstile. In the 20s we doom scroll and listen to Spotify while tapping out with our phone.
All of that that they did while they sit. I don’t remember people reading the newspapers while slow walking in the middle of a corridor. And the problem with headphones is that they make people unaware of their surrounding, alone in the world, and therefore for instance unaware that there is someone on their left that they will cut the way to. Small incivilities, but repeat several times a day every day and it gets seriously annoying.
Certainly people would do that. And sending text messages in the 00s. People have been wearing headphones while commuting for a generation, and (not on the underground but certainly on trains) people in the 80s and 90s were far more obnoxious - get stuck on a busy train between people having conversations about inane stuff while smoking.
Public transport is far better today than it was 30 years ago, annoyances are far less than they were.
The only benefit was the ability to jump on and off away from bus stops. If you had any kind of mobility issue they were awful, and even if you didn’t they were still far more camped than a modern bus.
This behaviour is so bad on London (above ground) trains, if they ever do 'crack it' and roll out mobile signal to the Underground, those tiny carriages will be unbearable.
London, increasingly common. I’d say a third of the time when I take the tube. Combine that with people making loud calls, 100% of the time. But I find people imposing their music or tiktok videos more obnoxious than a builder discussing his next job a bit loudly.
I think it will depend on your route and the time of your commute. I see fairly distinct behaviour at different times on the tube & Elizabeth Line: come in or leave late and it's full of people who are much less considerate, go in with the majority and there's a bit more social pressure against being inconsiderate.
I also never see this behaviour, but I pretty much only use the tube for commuting at peak times. I think commuters are generally better behaved. The sheer density of people means that anti social behaviour will get angrily shut down very quickly.
It may also be highly dependent on which direction you travel. When you travel east from the city, you get totally different demographics than when you travel west.
I've not noticed that correlation at all. I just wanted to see who was brave enough to actually speak their racism or whether they'd just suggest it in a cowardly way.
That's true. I made several complaints about that to TFL before capitulating and just settling for noise-cancelling headphones.
Never been happier.
The clincher was noticing that the drivers themselves had access to ear defenders ... TFL said that that's because they're down there for extended periods of time. Sounds reasonable but I'm not buying that as a way out of not fixing the issue and exposing my ears to the worst bits of the tube.
Also has the ancillary benefits of blocking out those rare times (for me) when people do have their phone on speaker or are having a chat I'm uninterested in.
There's literally already signal on half the Underground, has been for six months to a year, and as someone who gets the tube twice a day I've literally never seen someone do voice call. Literally ever.
What is the thing with people using phones without headphones? And making calls on public transport? When did that become a thing? It’s the most obnoxious selfish behaviour and it shocks me every time.
It’s not just Gen Z either, I’ve seen a few boomers do it and even a couple of millennials.
Ten of so years ago I was on a train and the women opposite me gave all her credit card details to someone over the phone — anyone close by could have had fun with them
Not to excuse other people's behavior but buying a decent pair of noise canceling headphones or earbuds will make putting up with it a whole lot easier. You don't even have to listen to anything, or you can put rain noises and thunderstorms. It's as much better soundscape than public transport.
That also creates a problem that people then can not hear important announcements or be aware of dangers (such as knife wielding attackers, as happened on an LNER train just late last year)
You can still hear those things, just not obnoxiously loudly. NC works best against static sounds. Speech still makes it through. Just not as loud.
If you're in a busy car enough people will hear it to be aware, and if you're on your own you will hear the announcement clearly.
Besides it's really a one in 10 million chance you'll get stabbed on the metro, not worth worrying about. The chance of getting hit by a car in traffic is much higher. That feeling of always being in some kind of danger seems to be very American, I never really see that in people here in Europe. I think it's the sensationalism in the press there, every little incident is blown up to massive "BREAKING NEWS!" proportions.
Don't lecture me in a condescending manner. I'm British, I've taken the train all my life, and for years have worn NC headphones to counter the incessant announcements and anti social behaviour. I also have to my play my own music to drown it out
Also: generalising about Europeans is quite ignorant. As is ignoring recent data and recent risks and just citing long term data to insinuate people are being hysterical
Because silence is a common good, like clean air. It's everyone's. When people fill it with their noise they effectively privatize it for the duration. When they shout on speakerphone or play their music or blare sound from their apps it's especially selfish.
I know, it's pathetic. It's partly because they don't want to pay for the staff to do the enforcement and partly probably some other reasons.
In classic British style they just try to influence and nudge people with campaigns and posters. That way the organisation doesn't have to deal with awkward accusations of racism etc
You do understand that one of those “needs”affects others around you, and one of them leaves them in peace, right?
Also I’m sure parent wasn’t referring to emergency calls
If I recall correctly, a prior interview about claude plays pokemon stated they purposely chose pokemon as a use case that was not meant to be trained/finetuned on. That's what makes it an interesting problem, so hopefully they aren't.
I believe the testing itself is done in very good faith.
But I believe the team at Antrophic looks for popular use cases like this one to improve their datasets. Same for every other big player in the LLM game.
Not wanting to use Vercel is honestly a good enough reason. If you’re a heavy Vercel user you probably aren’t their target market since they’re aiming at enterprise types from what it looks like.
Everyone will have a “reasonable” explanation though for why they have to stay in the terminal even when they aren’t really coding anymore and it wouldn’t be hard to have a window next to your terminal if you really have to, but live and let live. Whatever makes you happy as be all become managers.
I too like a cyberpunk interface even if it’s last the need :)