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Comment by bottlepalm | Hacker News Reader

I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop. VS Code has become a code review tool and place where I manage git if need be.

The GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, which makes history easier and cleaner to scroll through, also no scrolling bugs, rich text is easier to read with tables, and images integrated into the chat, resources like browsers in the context of the session. Drag and drop session organization (pins), scheduled tasks, etc.. all that in the side bar.

Usually a TUI would be open in VS Code and scoped to whatever repo I'm working with so 10 projects, 10 VS Code instances open, not super scalable. With the GUI desktop app it's one app, and I can start sessions in an repo and switch between them easily, no need to open VS Code for each. I don't see what could make me want to go back to using a TUI.

Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?

View on HN

How do you sandbox Claude desktop?

I went from TUI and tested several GUIs that can also support a "TUI" view.

After testing several options at the moment I'm using Orca IDE as my daily driver - effectively as a layer on top anthropic / openai

- Supports both anthropic and openai with subscriptions and can you swithc easily between those two + other LLms

- Its a bit hidden / non intuitive to setup but it does support running everything on remove host -> I run (95%) of my jobs on remote hosts that I can both access from my laptop + their native app via a wirguard vpn

- You can switch between chatview + TUI on the same conversation - very useful if you move e.g. from desktop session to mobile view.

- For repeating LLM tasks Orca also suports a kind of scheduler - but I prefer currently to have the agent set things up via chronjobs on the remote machine (not super happy with this ...)

Key reason I dont want to go fully ChatGPT/Claude is also I dont want to build a super strong dependency on those mega players and remain the ability to switch to other interefernce providers / models.

As LLM usage is already a core workflow in our company - a sudden unavailability of one or a massive price increase - makes it absolutely necessary to build out alternatives.

We all know the downsides of SAAS Lock in too well from the 2010s. In that sense Fool me once, fool me twice..

+1 on the Orca and remote machine. I've basically turned it into my own Claw machine. It does super well at letting me remote in across 3 computers and phone and hitting all the same sessions. I have one master session that is always kept alive as my main "agent", and spin out other full sessions from that.

It solves the crappy user experience of the CLI vs using an SSH terminal in VS code. (Easy copy pasting, everything formatted correctly, etc.) I created my own version of artifact hosting with a simple "mailbox" page on the box - every session can drop it's html reports off there nicely.

Completely agree on being able to flex out to different models. I'm using Claude Code as daily driver given the insane subsidies we are getting. But want something where I can switch easily onto the open weights, etc.

Sadly Orca doesn't support chatview via WSL

I find TUI scales better for multiple concurrent agents across the same and different codebases, especially using tools such as herdr. I can fire off an agent, which runs sub-agents. Then check-in periodically to re-steer as needed or be interrupt driven for completions of tasks. I can't see how vscode/GUI is better for this?

Same... I use herdr to manage 12+ sessions easily. There's no GUI that can do that.

This seems to be the new meta for a segment of the HN crowd, and I'm struggling to understand how it works. I'm at most having 4 sessions parallely, and even then I am burned out after a full day of this. How can you keep up with what all the agents are doing?

From the people around me doing this - they aren't keeping up, they aren't looking at the finished project/product, then throwing it over the wall for others to triage. Rinse and repeat. Definitely fits some people's personalities, but not mine.

no way anyone has 12 "projects" that are even worth working on. No one at any company is working on 12 things at the same time.

I guarantee they're just starting a bunch of half baked random projects, abandoning them half way through and starting 12 new ones.

I am using paseo.sh, with 12+ sessions across pi/codex/agy on 3 dev machines.

Herdr looks similar to the Jetbrains Air stuff they just added to their IDEs. You can have GUI sessions in tabs, label them, tag them, stick them in folders, archive them, put them next to the code that's being changed, etc.

Cc desktop supports folders, named tabs, archived sessions, subagents with two way comms between them and their spawner.

You cannot put them next to code being changed but the code viewers are contextual to the session.

I am struggling to see a major difference let alone major advantage of herdr

For me the tight integration with Claude Artifacts (and whatever OpenAIs copy of those is) is super value-able for me. The biggest bottleneck for me is gathering all my thoughts and analyzing what needs to be done.

I was a long term user of the TUI and tools like cmux / herdr but now I find it much easier to actually focus

Check out https://open-artifacts.com - it gives you that and much more. It also allows your agent sessions to talk to each other regardless of which machine they’re running on. It’s free and OSS. I’m the creator - happy to answer questions.

Very nice!!! I actually built something much more primitive as my workflow too. I'll definitely send the robots to learn from you and what you did!

(Edited after research: I picked up your ideas of search and versioning. Very nice! Thank you!)

I graduated from Claude Code to Herdr to now T3Code.

T3Code can do anything I might need such a tool to. It supports a bunch of different harnesses, therefore also subscriptions. It supports running agents on different servers, from the same GUI. Mobile app that works well. Orchestration that allows any agent to orchestrate others in T3Code directly.

T3 Code has a few weaknesses compared to Claude desktop but on the whole it is excellent. It’s my primary agentic coding tool right now.

I hear people swear by https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo

Not only it's a GUI in client-server topology, it can also orchestrate the agents to work for you.

Haven't tried it yet.

Paseo has been pretty amazing at getting more autonomy. It's the way the agent profiles work. It is effectively a fully adaptive "auto-harness" with just the tiniest amount of config.

Fully switched from TUI 4 weeks back while testing it out for another use case.

Wrote about my setup here: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/10/larping-with-agents-and-wh...

Thanks, bookmarked. Orca is another option in this space https://onorca.dev

Looks like GitHub is down (again)? I'm getting a 504.

It's been up and down for me all morning.

Works for me

I switched to the Linux desktop as soon as it was available to avoid all of the TUI rendering bugs and restore sensible copy/paste. I was using vscode's git panel to review diffs before they got committed, but had a feeling that there had to be a way to make agents pull harder so my review wasn't always the long pole in the tent.

Imagine a local GitHub PR web UI (thanks to difit), married to your agent for real time in-context discussions, and built-in skills to teach agents how to write easy to follow PR, focusing on both why's and hows.

Last night I released gavel that scratches this itch: it's open source, so fork and enjoy. https://photostructure.com/coding/gavel/

I just ended up making my own GUI. I never really liked any of the pre-build ones. It started slow (3-4 days of work) and grew organically around my working style. I can also have my preferred UX (e.g., high information density).

Take a look at the Codex App Server or the Claude Agent SDK as a way to communicate with harnesses running headlessly and build your own UI on top. I’m sure Pi can be set up in a similar fashion.

I have the same setup. All you need is a server hosted on your own machine and a few adapters to connect them to providers using ACP and various thin client all connected through tailnet. I have developed my own web and mobile applications with gemini live full duplex routing to opus my local projects and maintain the same session across any platform I choose, including Hermes. Building personal software is easy these days.

I've been building my own open-source coding agent, VT Code, in Rust.

I wanted more control over the harness itself, especially tool execution, sandboxing, approvals, and context management.

Recently built a native macOS app with GPUI on top of the same agent runloop. It's been interesting exploring how the same engine works across terminal and desktop workflows.

https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode

I did this for myself several times. I started with winforms and evolved into a full blown clone of ChatGPT.com experience built as a razor/MVC project in .NET10.

I have 2 versions that are just for working on unity projects. One that is for working on the client project. There is also one that I refer to as the ring of power / Death Star that I keep mostly to myself. Eventually, the client saw what I was doing and decided they wanted a custom ChatGPT.com experience for the whole team, so I got paid to build the most recent one.

Using AI to assist with the development of this stuff is the RSI you've been looking for. I'm in a situation where I was only able to solve a problem due to two levels of bootstrapping enabled by custom harnesses. The product the client uses cannot be "one shot" using the latest frontier tools. I had to build an ad-hoc agent loop fit for just that one purpose using another tool that was possible to build via copilot. For example, using copilot in VS over a unity project's scripts might as well be a drunk person throwing darts from a boat compared to a purpose built harness that can execute ad-hoc scripts in the editor environment as often as it pleases.

The client's custom experience is better than ChatGPT.com in many important ways now. It certainly performs better. It will run on safari without doing horrific things to layout and my CPU. You can easily exceed the capabilities of the frontier AI companies in ways that are important if you use their tools cleverly. These companies are great at making AI models. Not harnesses, websites, apps, etc.

I went the same way but found that the GUIs (Claude and Codex Desktop) are still too low-level to scale well. They are basically just tabbed chat windows. I wanted more structure and more targeted UX for managing my work. It's easy nowadays to build your own GUI, so I did.

(I found it's still quite some work to polish it so that it's actually good. Therefore, sharing it could still benefit others, so I did: obeya.si, free, open-source)

I am not a terminal head, but I find it simpler to drop into a dir and codex from there. In the GUIs, I often mistakenly end up under the wrong tab (Chat/Work/Code) and if I am in Chat, sooner or later the thing will ask me to switch to Work. On the other hand, the GUI provides the history of threads. I semi defeated this by using hooks to write questions and answers to an SQLite db.

I’m being slowly forced to use a GUI at work, and it’s fine, but I simply prefer the TUI.

I use:

claude agents

Granted, I run it as a terminal tab in my editor so that I can look at files. I prefer the TUI in a tab instead of the editor’s half-assed plugin. These days, however, I mostly look at PRs in the browser.

For my personal work I still prefer to let the agent edit the local files so I can preview the changes in my editor. I avoid PRs in my personal work.

> now I'm using ChatGPT/Claude desktop

Same, it's lovely software for that mode of work!

I also briefly tried out other ADEs, like:

- Kepler (by the GitKraken folks) - https://www.gitkraken.com/kepler

- Paseo - https://paseo.sh/

Kepler had a really nice issue tracker integration but the UI was very vibey and not quite as to the point as I'd like (who needs graph visualization of what the agents do, just give me tools that work), and Paseo had a really nice UI that I could use to drive both Codex and Claude Code, but some OpenCode agents would sometimes hang and I didn't have tools to really do anything about it.

Maybe I should also give JetBrains Air a look again, if I ever end up subscribing to them again (I just moved to Zed for my code editing): https://www.jetbrains.com/air/

Interesting space, with so many additional tools popping up! That said, the OpenCode TUI was really pleasant too.

I actually just decided to cancel my Jetbrains account, and your comment made me think about trying Air before I go.

I went to my Jetbrains Toolbox, and it's not there.

I went to the site, and there are 3 options:

Install it as a plugin to one of their other IDEs. This feels really stupid to me.

Air Teams. This isn't widely available yet, and you have to ask nicely and be put on a list. No go.

Air CLI. I honestly don't know WTF this is doing that I couldn't just do from the CLI with my existing agents. I already have Antigravity (for planning) using Claude for implementation and all I had to do was ask Antigravity to set it up.

They really need to get their stuff together over there at Jetbrains.

Air was a standalone app, but it wasn't clear why and they got feedback that this wasn't wanted. You can have the exact same GUIs and functionality integrated into the IDE and it's a pure functionality upgrade. For example, Air in IntelliJ/their other IDEs lets you do things like execute SQL queries on connected databases from the chat box and have the results be sent straight to the model.

There's a school of thought that says IDEs are history, their functionality is now worthless etc. But apparently lots of people don't think that.

I guess I'm one of those people too, because I tried the Air standalone app but it didn't gel for me for some reason. But I tried Air in IntelliJ and it immediately clicked. If models were always perfect and their work never benefited from reviews or changes, fine, you could argue the IDE is pointless. But it's been years and I've not yet found a model where that's true. You can slop for a while if the project isn't that important but for the stuff that matters, human intervention still changes the quality slope quite a lot.

Don't forget about their AI Assistant (agentic but mostly chat focused plugin) and Junie (a harness, that you can apparently use through Air too), people have critiqued them about it being messy, but tbh OpenCode for example has TUI, web and desktop versions heh.

Oh to make things more interesting, Air also has a mobile option too, adding to the list. Odd to couple it with an IDE though since you have various IDEs for various stacks (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA vs WebStorm vs GoLand, unless you just shove a crapload of plugins into IDEA) and agentic tools don't always need all of that.

To be fair though, they're probably scrambling to keep up with the AI craze because it cuts into their margins A LOT and throwing everything they can at the wall. Shame they killed Fleet, could have been a cool basis to compete with Zed (or VS Code, more directly) and integrate Air there or something.

""GUI is less verbose with the nitty gritty hidden in expandable sections, ""

? The GUI has nothing to do with that.

If you use Chat / Work / Code <- that's the differentiation.

So 'Code' in 'Gui' is identical to Claude Code except for the visual layout.

If you use Work or Chat, which are not optimized for Coding you'll see a different experience.

If you use iTerm or Ghostty and set a key combo to switch tabs you can very easily switch between tabs and the TUI generally gives more dense information.

Usually people migrate to TUI not the other way around.

I think that there are reasons to use GUI - if there is deeper integration with Git or an issue tracker - or - in VSCode - for navigating files etc. - definitely those things are valid.

But for raw AI the getting a TUI to work the way you want it is ideal.

I don't get why people love TUIs so much. They're basically GUIs made using inferior tools. Why hammer in a nail using your fist if you have a hammer handy?

A GUI is strictly more powerful than a TUI (because a GUI could just show plain text in cases where that is the most appropriate mode of interaction, E.G. Bloomberg, AMadeus), but it could also do so much more in cases where it is not.

I do love terminals, don't get me wrong. When what you're interacting with is CLIs and Unix tools in a shell, a terminal is exactly what you want. I do love the Unix philosophy, I like small and composable tools that you can use together, and I think the interactive way of working that a shell or REPL can give you is great (though notebooks would have been better, but that's beside the point). Those are things that the terminal shines at. Pretending to be a GUI is not one of those things.

Most GUIs are designed in a way that I dislike. It’s true that terminals lack power compared to GUIs, and some GUI apps (Bloomberg, Blender, …) are reasonably well designed for their use case, but most GUIs are such a disaster that it’s almost more fun interacting with them via curl to an API or SQL directly to a database.

The other problem is that all the GUI apps look different. I really want one extremely powerful, composable GUI “framework” that all apps sit within. Ideally I could even decompose and recombine parts of different apps into new tools or workspaces.

Now that anyone can build a GUI by prompting LLMs, maybe we’ll get actually good GUIs, or at least be able to build our own, but up to now the direction of travel has been disappointing to say the least.

I suspect that this is what Mitchell Hashimoto is up to with Rex and Superlinear.

Most agentic UIs are structured exactly the same regardless of the interface. TUIs are not composable in any possible meaning of that word (unlike CLI/REPL), they are GUIs on a fixed cell grid. Real TUI aren't unified either.

They are rich TUI but they remain somewhat scriptable environments. From the plain claude -p to run Claude code unattended, all the way to setting up hooks, MCP tools and injecting key presses. Complex and hackish yes, but probably not worse than attempting to automate fully GUI tools like Claude desktop which is meant to automate stuff, not the other way around.

All that is completely UI-agnostic and not related to GUI/TUI distinction in absolutely any way. Keypress automation is terrible, if you have to resort to jank like this you'd better use something like AT-SPI (which no TUI implements) or at least DOM manipulation and userscripts on web, although I've never seen a use case for that, sanely designed agents are malleable enough to avoid it.

The point is that I agree with the OP, terminals are fundamentally unfit for applications like agents that are not REPL and need complex interfaces. All attempts to fit them into it I've seen are 99% cargo cult, like the entire TUI zoo that keeps layering the cruft just because people are culturally averse to clean first-principle designs or put pretentious "aesthetics" first. Just look at the amount of misconceptions voiced ITT. This incidental complexity is destined to snowball into web/Electron-like Rube Goldberg machines pretty fast, and I guarantee you will hate it. It's already spinning out of control with agents.

Because a minimum viable GUI is way worse experience than a minimum viable TUI. Also GUIs take more skill in order to feel performant, which many companies do not possess (just look at various documentation webapps that take >100ms just to navigate between really simple mostly-text pages. Horrible).

Good GUIs with full keyboard functionality are definitely better than TUIs though. There's just no guarantee that some solo dev'd GUI for a brand new workflow can meet that standard.

A couple of reasons

1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size)

2. Usable over the network (ssh)

3. Often much easier to drive with automation software (agents/scripts)

4. Ui tends to be dense, matches your font perferences

> 1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size)

Have you used Claude TUI? :-)

> 3. Often much easier to drive with automation software (agents/scripts)

TUIs? Not really. TUIs aren't composable, CLIs are. Now, many TUIs also have a separate CLI mode built-in, but guess what, many good GUIs also have a built-in CLI.

TUIs are also frequently harder to automate via click-click than decent GUIs, since mature GUI toolkits tend to have built-in accessibility and I doubt anyone has ever programmed extra accesibility into any TUI in history, outside of the default keyboard access they get because they're inherently character driven (though that can take you quite far).

Many TUIs break even basic UI composability stuff like copy/paste; accessibility is even lower down the list.

Terminals are 'activity dense' and usually have a lot of key cusotmizations.

You can't even have 'tabs' inside of Claude Desktop, which is a dealbreaker for most power users.

It's because you can ssh into something and VNC sucks.

GUIs are great when you're sitting in front of the computer it's running on. Trying to do anything remotely with them is terrible. RDP is pretty great at making that experience suck less tho.

Ironically, remote work is the main thing I use Claude Desktop (and mobile) for. When I work locally, I’m usually happy with the TUI, unless I need a lot of equations or images. When I work remotely, keeping the SSH connection alive or juggling tmux sessions is too much of a hassle, and running the remote session from Claude Desktop/mobile is more comfortable.

Just a heads up, I build Cosyra, a mobile terminal app, so this problem is something I've been considering a lot. For the SSH side, mosh fixes most of it. And for the tmux sessions I use a leader terminal who does all the juggling for me. Remote control is great, but then I'm completely locked into using Claude which, for me, does not work.

Claude has a killer feature for me with that remote-control command.

Spawn a Claude TUI where you need it and take remote control with no friction.

I tried it in codex and they messed up the flow so bad. You need to add a device oauth token every time you set it up even though it's already logged into your account.

One benefit is that they're easy to use remotely over SSH or in a VM, but I agree that a local, native GUI is generally better than a TUI.

You can use VSCode over SSH as well.

You can but with agents you might want a security boundary/faux-airgap between the agent and your machine. I don't think you should trust X11/Wayland forwarding to maintain strong isolation against a malicious server in that scenario.

TUIs are superior in that case because they cuts the attack surface down to a regular SSH session.

Agreed. I sandbox agents using containers which also allows me to inject credentials and all sorts of things.

I think there's 2 clear layers in these coding tools: the runtime engine that lives ON the system, can execute commands, read/write files, make network calls and the UI, which can be a local (TUI) or remote.

A remote UI allows you to manage multiple remote runtimes concurrently and can even be on your phone.

Anyone preferring Desktop vs TUI is not managing multiple systems I would guess.

Are you saying I should go back to GUI? I just feel it’s so awkward. I have LazyVim for more advanced review, Hunk, etc… the GUI is like a inferior version of Eclipse IDE or something. Or it used to be, atleast.

I love the terminal.

I live my life in the terminal.

I use lazygit all the time. I integrate delta with it.

But I use vscode GitLens for diffs.

I always find the view port in lazygit to be too narrow. My feeble brain cannot work with so few context.

You and me, bro. Look at this diff plugin for nvim, so pleasant. You’ll avoid vscode

https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/3AyZ4NSBMz

Personally the Claude Code TUI also sucked every time i used it. Scrollback bugs in IDEA embedded shells, extraneous output vs the VSCode extension, and unreliable links to source code.

Isn't the CC TUI written in React?? I mean my web dev "all i have is this hammer" brain is intrigued, but surely, there's better things to do? Like you said, the terminal is great for piping inputs and outputs, for scripting, for bulk operations. It's really not great for real time interaction across many files, which is how i use CC and kind of wonder how you would use it any other way. (I guess if you literally just prompt and pray, the UI literally doesn't matter?)

Herdr changed my tui game. Pi but for tmux.

Yea me too. I also wnet GUI for a little bit until I discovered herdr.

I thought the TUI was the ultimate power tool and loved the original embrace from claude code. I still use TUI a lot, but have been using deepseek harness web app atop my local model and am already liking the better organization and UI of this interface. I can see my load shifting to it. But you are right, you almost always need a VS Code interface open as well.

The outputs of Opus 5.5 were so much easier to read, but I do find the the deepseek web based tool much easier to comprehend for some reason. Plus I can access it from phone (over tailscale) as well when out and about and continue sessions very easily. AND it is all open source/weights. I'm pretty thrilled, but it's been less than a week.

Claude Web app includes Claude code tab with remote option to work from your own machine (if preferred). I am using it very often.

I have a project folder which is my default environment, and within it I have my many repo clones. That way I can work on any project from my prompt and reference elements in one project to include in another.

I continue to get good results using lifeOS (though I don't use the entire setup) https://github.com/danielmiessler/LifeOS

claude is a terminal-themed gui, not a tui.

People seem to forge Claude has a very powerful GUI as well. I don’t get why most still seem to be using it in the terminal instead. A bit like emacs. The GUI is infinitely superior to use!

because it's yet another potential attack surface

> claude is a terminal-themed gui, not a tui.

It fits most definitions of a TUI, though. Just with lots of scrolling text.

Don't confuse TUI with CLI.

I think this was a marketing play by ANthropic.

Look, it's just a tool, you are a developer, you've used TUIs all your career, this is just one more TUI, no different than your beloved Vim or Emacs. No need to be scared, this won't replace you because mere mortals won't know what to do with a TUI, so you can use it freely and get more work done, just as you were always obsessed with doing when configuring your Vim bindings.

Then, a year in, when everybody is hooked line and sinker, people start to understand that the TUI is the least important part of the whole thing, and the model and harness are what really matters.

I've been using deepseek lately (just the chat interface on hobby stuff) and it's frankly better at searching the web and writes less like it's trying to bullshit its way through pretending to know what it's doing, i think it is just easier to understand. Unfortunately it also is more often wrong, or more often writes bugs, but i guess in a harness that's kinda mitigated -- it does usually find its earlier mistakes ime

And it's so fast! Claude often thinks for >60s which drives me insane for simple questions. Maybe it's also the configuration of the harness, but at least the web interface of Deepseek already has half a page written after a single second - a bliss!

I also like the inner text display of the GUI more, but the window management of it terrible IMO. On my Mac I have 3 desktops open, one for "private" and two for a project each. With the Claude TUIs I just have 1-5 open terminals per desktop, each with its title neatly set automatically. With the GUI app, I can only have 1 open, not one per desktop. It seems you can open several very reduced versions of the Claudr app with a single chat but that didn't work well for me. So that's why I'm still with TUIs..

Try herdr (or something like it). For me it fits exactly between claude desktop and having lots of open terminals.

The UI can be made to fit exactly the workflow you want to have.

I switched to it recently - my previous workflow was managing many terminals in a tiling window manager but I just kept losing track of stuff.

I've lost faith in the ChatGPT desktop app. It's nicer than managing a bunch of TUI sessions, but it's so prone to losing session history / context.

The MacOS one has a dreadful startup time as well. I can have the website open in ms but the app takes 7 or 8 seconds

I switched to the GUIs half a year ago and never looked back.

From the text rendering and scrolling alone, they are much more pleasant to work with.

Conversations with activity and MR status indicators, nested sessions, images in the chat, and generally more information and functionality on the screen.

One negative is that it gives Claude, and particularly Codex, room to mess up with auto-opening artifacts.

Codex, when I was still using it, kept opening report or comparison pages in fullscreen when I did not ask for artifacts.

Claude loves to open its iOS simulator pane, but somehow never displays the one it's actually using, instead showing a simulator that is idle. It might be related to my custom tooling.

I dislike the harness TUIs for this for the same reasons. Nothing against TUI in general, the lazy* universe for example is great.

OpenChamber (the desktop app, not the VSC extension) for OpenCode currently works best for me. Especially because of its seamless remote control via their iOS app.

One of the very first thing you should do is stop using vscode’s terminal.

Use something like Rex, Ghostty, kitty or whatever floats your boat.

You will have a much better experience.

I use the terminal for most of my agentic workflows.

I still use vscode, but only for diffing and the proprietary devcontainer stuff.

Much less memory usage, too; each "vscode" window/tab takes a few GB, a claude in a terminal is 200mb.

> Who else is just using the GUI nowadays, or are you still on the TUI, and why, have you tried the GUI interfaces?

I generally prefer GUIs but I'm OK with a TUI harness. Anyway, there's a web frontend for Pi (https://github.com/agegr/pi-web) which looks very promising although it still has some rough edges. They even have an interactive demo: https://agegr.github.io/pi-web/

I'm not associated with the project.

Some of it is the historical snobbery that CLI users have for GUI users. I count myself among them. Isn't it way cooler how I can fix my NIC with just three chained bash commands, while the windows users have to navigate 8 levels of dialogues?

But that mentality doesn't leave room for a lot of nuance. Even the most hard core TUI proponents and neovim gurus probably do not use Lynx as their browser (well maybe they use a vibe coded hacker news TUI client instead)

Im also using the desktop apps (codex/claude). Using the tui doesn’t bring any advantage anymore. I can drag and drop pdfs, images, i have the browser view, can easily switch between conversations, fork them at any point.

I use whatever IDE to review the code, read tests, etc. I used to use the terminal for everything prio AI, but not anymore.

You can drag and drop files in the TUI. You can also paste in images. With tmux you have forking, and tmux windows are fully scriptable, and controllable via your agent. I have them run shell tasks in tmux windows so I can see what they’re doing.

I was confused until you mentioned you were running it in VS Code. That issue goes away if you run it in a standalone terminal with tmux or tabs.

I'm still using the TUI. I've ditched my IDE and use Sublime Text with LSP for code reviews and navigation. It works great for me.

Just GUI now. I can also connect to Mac Codex from my phone and have a voice chat with it. Collects all my work in projects, can jump in and out anytime. Can start a project on the phone, move to Mac. (Almost) No sync issues, which I found the TUI/phone had.

I mostly use TUI because I have agents running on different servers over SSH.

I often need agents on one server to talk to a different agent on another server through tmux, and it's just much easier with TUI.

No idea what you're working on, but if it's anything involving sifting a lot of data, how do you know if your code actually works or does what Claude says it's doing?

I wanted to use the Claude GUI but it wants me to enable developer mode just to run it on Windows.

Would love to use a GUI, however it doesn't work properly for WSL either in 1st party or 3rd party clients like Orca, so I'm stuck with TUI

How do you handle the errors that the agents make?

How do you handle the potential errors that might be hidden in parts of the code you don’t understand anymore?

Or do you have 100% understanding of the generated code?

I'm using pi with herdr/ovis, which gets me both a GUI and a TUI. There's a Chat/Terminal switch, which is just a different view of the same pi session. It's got a decent mobile web UI, and I've been really liking it so far.

I’m using one iTerm to host the TUIs. The RAM cost is a tiny fraction of modern electron-based gui slop

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