Stop Making TUIs
Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March , and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis. I'm not habitually…
For years, the tech industry has grappled with the peculiar allure of terminal and command line interfaces. The author, a seasoned professional, has recently taken a different approach by building native user interfaces. This shift has led to the creation of several applications, such as MDV.app, a Markdown viewer, and a native calculator-style frontend for SageMath.
MDV.app, despite the author's minimal involvement in its UI code, is praised for its simplicity and efficiency. Similarly, the SageMath frontend provides a user-friendly interface for mathematical computations, generating LaTeX output and offering shortcuts for common operations. The Apple Music player, DJ Roomba, utilizes an LLM agent to manage the user's music library and provides a no-skips playlist based on the user's mood.
The author also discusses LLMwiki, a self-driving wiki that generates content based on user input and queries. Additionally, a semiautomated food macro tracker, a menu-bar Apple TV remote control, and a temperature monitoring system for a house are presented as examples of native macOS applications developed with the help of AI.
Despite the author's reservations about the complexity of these projects, they find the process of configuring their computers to achieve desired results both enjoyable and enlightening. The author acknowledges the potential for critique regarding the visual design of the SwiftUI interfaces they have created, but remains confident in the utility of these AI-assisted applications.
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- Stop Making TUIs sockpuppet.org
