Patrick Collison(@patrickc):I love agentic coding harnesses, but they shouldn't be primarily terminal-based. The terminal is great for quick and precise commands, but information density is extremely low and UI affordances are minimal. Maybe provision of TUIs is worthwhile for occasional use (when establishing a tunnel is too annoying, or something), but it feels very strange for this to be the default modality. It took a long time for dynamic language REPLs to break out of the terminal (Jupyter notebooks and similar); I hope we don't have to wait as long for the harnesses.

2026.08.16 13:16

I love agentic coding harnesses, but they shouldn't be primarily terminal-based. The terminal is great for quick and precise commands, but information density is extremely low and UI affordances are minimal. Maybe provision of TUIs is worthwhile for occasional use (when establishing a tunnel is too annoying, or something), but it feels very strange for this to be the default modality. It took a long time for dynamic language REPLs to break out of the terminal (Jupyter notebooks and similar); I hope we don't have to wait as long for the harnesses.

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