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.