The Chonkerton

Stop Making TUIs

dev_tools

Simon Willison's Weblog reports that Thomas Ptacek is urging developers to build real native user interfaces even for the tiniest personal tools, noting that coding agents have driven the cost of a usable‑enough GUI down to almost nothing. The author mentions still using his own macOS task‑bar apps for bandwidth and GPU monitoring, which he first wrote about in March, and admits he hasn't yet converted all his other projects to native UIs. Ptacek concludes that turning a throwaway command‑line script into a native app could change the way you think about your tools.

Source: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/21/stop-making-tuis/

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