Thomas Ptacek · 2026-08-20 · notable
Thomas Ptacek — coding agents make native apps cheap, so stop building TUIs
Thomas Ptacek argues that terminal UIs only ever existed because of modems and because Unix developers avoided GUI toolkits. Coding agents now write idiomatic SwiftUI, so a small native Mac app costs about as little as a CLI.
Thomas Ptacek says coding agents removed the last excuse for shipping a terminal UI instead of a real app.
What is it?
'Stop Making TUIs' is an essay by Thomas Ptacek arguing that developers should stop building terminal user interfaces and build native graphical apps instead. Ptacek's claim about why TUIs exist is blunt: 'TUIs exist for just two reasons: modems, and because Unix nerds didn't want to learn Motif.' Both reasons, he writes, expired a long time ago.
How does it work?
The evidence is a run of small macOS apps Ptacek built with Claude and Codex agents: MDV.app, a Markdown viewer; DJ Roomba, an Apple Music player with an LLM agent inside; Self Driving Wiki.app, a wiki backed by SQLite; a SageMath calculator front end; a menu-bar thermometer called Thermite; and an Apple TV remote. He never opened Xcode — the build is a plain Makefile — and pointed the agents at skills for macOS design, Paul Hudson's SwiftUI material, and Airbnb's Swift style guide.
Why does it matter?
Native interface work used to need a specialist, which is the real reason backend developers kept shipping command-line tools. That boundary is what Ptacek says agents dissolved: an agent follows Apple's own SwiftUI patterns closely enough to produce something reasonable, so the cheap default for a personal tool moves from the terminal to the desktop. Simon Willison, linking the piece the next day, said he is 'running out of excuses'.
Who is it for?
backend and systems developers
Try it
Pick one throwaway CLI and ask a coding agent to rebuild it as a native app.