Stop Making TUIs

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/08/20/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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-swiftui/">back in March, and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis.

I'm not habitually knocking out real UIs for my other projects yet, but I'm running out of excuses!

Thomas:

If you haven’t tried your hand at turning one of your 500 throwaway CLIs into a native app, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Go build a native UI. It’ll probably change the way you think.

Tags: https://simonwillison.net/tags/thomas-ptacek">thomas-ptacek, https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai, https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai, https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms, https://simonwillison.net/tags/vibe-coding">vibe-coding, https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents">coding-agents