So I had a realization recently that I find kind of hilarious. I’m 40 years old. I grew up watching the entire computer industry spend decades getting us away from the command line. DOS gave way to Windows. Commands became buttons. Config files became settings menus. Everything got icons, installers, wizards, drag-and-drop, etc. And apparently I have now traveled back in time because I spend half my life looking at this again: $ _ Except this time it’s spread across three 4K monitors and being powered by an RTX 4090. 😂 I’m on Linux a lot now. SSH, tmux, Pi, Codex, llama.cpp, local models, random CLI utilities…I’ve regularly got multiple terminal sessions open doing completely different things. And now, to really complete the circle, I’m seriously considering switching my Linux desktop over to Omarchy/Hyprland because I’m looking at my current GUI and thinking, “You know what this needs? More terminals.” I have somehow become the exact computer user that 1990s Microsoft was trying to save me from. Which got me thinking about why this happened, because I don’t think it’s just me becoming progressively nerdier with age. The command line has always been ridiculously powerful. The problem was that you had to know how to use the damn thing. You had to know the command. Then the flags. Then the syntax. Then where somebody decided the config file should live. Then that one stupid option you forgot that causes the whole thing to fail. Then you Google the error message and end up reading a Stack Overflow answer from 2013 written by somebody who is VERY annoyed that you don’t already know this. And then AI came along and kind of broke that whole equation. I can basically tell an agent: Find what’s using port 8080. Figure out whether I can kill it without breaking something. If I can, kill it, restart the service, and check the logs to make sure it actually came back up. I don’t necessarily have to know the commands anymore. I mean, it helps and you probably should still learn them, but now, I really could get away with just knowing what I’m trying to accomplish. And that’s a very significant difference. GUIs originally solved a discoverability problem. You didn’t need to memorize somecommand --some-flag --other-flag ; you could poke around until you found a button that looked promising. Now I can describe what I want to happen in plain English and let the AI figure out which arcane incantation makes Linux actually do it. Meanwhile, all the stuff that made terminals useful in the first place is still there. They’re lightweight, scriptable, remote-friendly, composable, easy to automate, and, perhaps most importantly now, an AI can operate one extremely well. I’m definitely not predicting the death of the GUI or anything. I like buttons. Buttons are nice. But apparently my own trajectory has gone: DOS → Windows → increasingly elaborate GUIs → AI in a web browser → AI in Windows Terminal → Linux + terminal → tmux → maybe I should just redesign my entire desktop around tiled terminals and install DHH’s ridiculously terminal-centric Linux setup Thirty years of progress and I have arrived back at a blinking cursor, typing commands into a terminal and barely touching the mouse. Except now the cursor talks back. We just put an AI on the other side of it. Anyway, I’m curious whether this has happened to anybody else who uses coding agents heavily. Are you spending more time in terminals now than you did before AI, or did AI mostly pull you further into IDEs and graphical tools? Edit: To those who already have, and those who inevitably will, accuse me of using AI to write this: in case you’re not aware, you’re in r/ArtificialInteligence . You’re not quite as clever as you think you are for “catching” someone using AI as part of their writing process. I write the initial draft myself. Then I give the AI a 206-line, 20 KB file specifically designed to preserve my voice as much as possible, strip out the usual AI-isms, and keep the final draft sounding like something I would actually say. If that bothers you, that’s fine. You can just keep scrolling. 🙄 If you stay and still leave a comment that doesn’t add signal, I will just block you. 🤷♀️ submitted by /u/e2_for_life
Originally posted by u/e2_for_life on r/ArtificialInteligence