TECH Signal 473
Developers urged to abandon terminal user interfaces in favor of native graphical applications
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Illustration only Photo by Ben Vaughn on Unsplash
The author argues that the engineering community should stop creating terminal-based UIs and start building native graphical apps, citing recent personal projects built with SwiftUI and LLM assistance.
Shifting from TUIs to native GUIs changes the required skill set, pushing engineers toward platform-specific knowledge and UI frameworks. This can improve end-user experience but also raises development effort, tooling costs, and potential vendor lock-in. Teams that maintain server-side or low-resource tools may need to keep TUIs for compatibility.
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The writer describes several native macOS apps, MDV, a SageMath frontend, and an AI-driven music player, built with SwiftUI and LLM-generated code.
Building good native UI is portrayed as tedious, repetitive, and demanding deep platform knowledge, which the author mitigates using AI assistance.
The author questions whether configuring AI tools to generate UI code counts as genuine software development.
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