Your snowflake to Claude code reminds me of an identical experience I had last week. I wanted to pull 3 seconds of audio off a YouTube video and turn it into a ringtone. I begin googling how to download a YouTube video and opened audacity with its millions of UI options. I got stressed out but then remembered that I had Claude code. I pulled it up in the terminal and started telling it what I wanted. It installed a couple packages like ffmpeg and then ran the commands to convert to audio. It was so fast and incredibly delightful. When I asked it to trim milliseconds of audio to get the audio clip just right I was humorously reminded of the scene from super troopers where the cop banged on the keyboard and said “enhance” over and over again.
What helps is that being really good at CLI ux as a user makes you feel way more powerful. There's an inner monologue that goes, "Wow, I made an incantation to change reality." vs. in a beautiful GUI, you feel less agency. CLIs bias towards this thinking, "I'm a better problem solver." vs. GUIs make you think, "This tool is good I guess." Not many people like to say, "I'm amazing at Informatica." as an example.
Yeah, there's definitely an element to this to me, where it feels like there's so much you could do with this if you learn how to use it. Like it has no real ceiling, whereas tools with fancy UIs and lots of guardrails feel like you can see everything that they can do.
(That said, I'm not sure that feeling is correct? You probably can do a whole lot of crazy stuff with informatica if you learned how to do it.)
I resonate with the "no real ceiling" piece. I think part of it is due to the opaqueness of being good with a CLI because people will nod their heads when they see your output and think, "Oh, this person is very technical and there's a lot of imagination going on in the brain as these gibberish logs cascade on the terminal." vs. "Oh, this guy made a rube goldberg machine with 127 GUI icons." It's less about mechanical correctness, more about perception of who's really doing the heavy lifting.
It reminds me of what I heard from this author Brandon Sanderson about the art of writing, "The author becomes the art piece." Then there's the adage, "Better writing is better thinking".
I hadn't heard that quote about author becoming the art piece, but i like that. Like, when you watch someone fly through a terminal, you're like, wow, how impressive. And then you watch someone fly through salesforce, and you're like, who bothers to learns how to do that?
I realize I'm weeks late to this, but I'm just thinking about this from the perspective of "being an expert at hard things is cool and being an expert at easy things is not cool". So when we take the same task and make it easier to do, it robs us of something, some satisfaction we get from it. So when you've got all the bells and whistles that makes it easier to use, becoming an expert user of it is no longer cool, even if the actual gaining of expertise is never easy
That makes sense to me, though the slightly curious thing is: what is easy and what is hard? Like, using a tool like Salesforce actually is pretty hard (because it's convoluted and bloated and pretty complex) but it doesn't look hard. Or cooking with a microwave - that could be really hard (and maybe just as hard as cooking with an oven), but something about it isn't cool.
Which makes me think it's somehow it's also about aesthetic, and like, sexiness, for lack of a better word. Some things just look lame, no matter how skillfully you wield them.
That's interesting, because 1) i think i agree with that divide, but 2) it seems somewhat counterintuitive, because so much of what we essentially try to build is software that makes things really easy and do stuff for you. But in the process, that anesthetizes the experience into something that no longer moves us at all.
There is the hypothesis that "the process" started off wrong at the beginning of shaping modern software creation. In this hypothesis, we try to improve the user experience incrementally. This brings to this anesthetizing state where we feel like we serve the machine instead of the contrary.
I see the return to a terminal experience as a way to review these first software shapes.
I have some loose hope that all this AI stuff does that a bit. It's such a new and different thing that it seems like a chance to reset a lot of things. I'm not sure I'm that optimistic about that happening (and so far, it's mostly chatbots and coding agents rather than anything really creative), but, here's to hoping.
I keep telling people that UIs are the hack we created to interface with computers because we didn't have the tools to effectively communicate directly with them. UIs are the human abstraction layer to compute. Claude code and Codex let us communicate directly like we always wanted.
Mostly, though there's also something to the (very light) UI of Claude code to me. You can off-road by just talking to it, but there's also enough there to be able to flip through more common stuff very quickly, it a way that seems to ease the burden of it being an almost blank white page.
Generally, I like it a lot as a product, and it's been very useful, but I don't think it has the same effect? Like, I find it more useful than Claude code (or more effective for doing what I want to do), which I'm a little bummed by, because I want to *use* Claude code.
Which is maybe an interesting angle here, that the sorta emotional thing really isn't about productivity. Being productive and all is great, but I'm more viscerally drawn to something else. Which is sort of obvious - tiktok is addictive and almost completely useless - but also a little counterintuitive, because we tend to think that productivity software should first and foremost be productive. I'm not sure that's actually the case though.
Fair, though how much of that is the story of the game, versus the feeling of the gameplay itself? (I'm not a video game guy, so I honestly don't know)
I have always thought that the ideal interface is a combination of command line and GUI. When using either it often turns out that parts of the other would useful depending on what you are doing.
Your snowflake to Claude code reminds me of an identical experience I had last week. I wanted to pull 3 seconds of audio off a YouTube video and turn it into a ringtone. I begin googling how to download a YouTube video and opened audacity with its millions of UI options. I got stressed out but then remembered that I had Claude code. I pulled it up in the terminal and started telling it what I wanted. It installed a couple packages like ffmpeg and then ran the commands to convert to audio. It was so fast and incredibly delightful. When I asked it to trim milliseconds of audio to get the audio clip just right I was humorously reminded of the scene from super troopers where the cop banged on the keyboard and said “enhance” over and over again.
"...but if it were mine, I’d look for an excuse to drive it?"
This is exactly how I felt about my 2013 GTI. I could not run enough errands.
What helps is that being really good at CLI ux as a user makes you feel way more powerful. There's an inner monologue that goes, "Wow, I made an incantation to change reality." vs. in a beautiful GUI, you feel less agency. CLIs bias towards this thinking, "I'm a better problem solver." vs. GUIs make you think, "This tool is good I guess." Not many people like to say, "I'm amazing at Informatica." as an example.
Yeah, there's definitely an element to this to me, where it feels like there's so much you could do with this if you learn how to use it. Like it has no real ceiling, whereas tools with fancy UIs and lots of guardrails feel like you can see everything that they can do.
(That said, I'm not sure that feeling is correct? You probably can do a whole lot of crazy stuff with informatica if you learned how to do it.)
I resonate with the "no real ceiling" piece. I think part of it is due to the opaqueness of being good with a CLI because people will nod their heads when they see your output and think, "Oh, this person is very technical and there's a lot of imagination going on in the brain as these gibberish logs cascade on the terminal." vs. "Oh, this guy made a rube goldberg machine with 127 GUI icons." It's less about mechanical correctness, more about perception of who's really doing the heavy lifting.
It reminds me of what I heard from this author Brandon Sanderson about the art of writing, "The author becomes the art piece." Then there's the adage, "Better writing is better thinking".
I hadn't heard that quote about author becoming the art piece, but i like that. Like, when you watch someone fly through a terminal, you're like, wow, how impressive. And then you watch someone fly through salesforce, and you're like, who bothers to learns how to do that?
I realize I'm weeks late to this, but I'm just thinking about this from the perspective of "being an expert at hard things is cool and being an expert at easy things is not cool". So when we take the same task and make it easier to do, it robs us of something, some satisfaction we get from it. So when you've got all the bells and whistles that makes it easier to use, becoming an expert user of it is no longer cool, even if the actual gaining of expertise is never easy
That makes sense to me, though the slightly curious thing is: what is easy and what is hard? Like, using a tool like Salesforce actually is pretty hard (because it's convoluted and bloated and pretty complex) but it doesn't look hard. Or cooking with a microwave - that could be really hard (and maybe just as hard as cooking with an oven), but something about it isn't cool.
Which makes me think it's somehow it's also about aesthetic, and like, sexiness, for lack of a better word. Some things just look lame, no matter how skillfully you wield them.
✊🏻
It still amazes me why terminal has this emotional effect. Thanks for bringing this discussion up 🙏
Is that a common thing? I honestly have no idea if this a normal thing or totally weird.
It feels normal to me.
Something related is to have anything accomplished with Poke
Yes, I can do the exact same with a dedicated UI - but somehow does not bring the same feeling.
I feel like it boils down to:
- the machine serves you
- you serve the machine
In many cases I feel like dedicated UI is in the latter
That's interesting, because 1) i think i agree with that divide, but 2) it seems somewhat counterintuitive, because so much of what we essentially try to build is software that makes things really easy and do stuff for you. But in the process, that anesthetizes the experience into something that no longer moves us at all.
There is the hypothesis that "the process" started off wrong at the beginning of shaping modern software creation. In this hypothesis, we try to improve the user experience incrementally. This brings to this anesthetizing state where we feel like we serve the machine instead of the contrary.
I see the return to a terminal experience as a way to review these first software shapes.
I have some loose hope that all this AI stuff does that a bit. It's such a new and different thing that it seems like a chance to reset a lot of things. I'm not sure I'm that optimistic about that happening (and so far, it's mostly chatbots and coding agents rather than anything really creative), but, here's to hoping.
Here is to hoping!
💯
I think you could have made some $ with that price of weed scraper. Develop a whime software suite around it.
I still get emails from college students about it about once every six months asking me to update it for some "research project."
I keep telling people that UIs are the hack we created to interface with computers because we didn't have the tools to effectively communicate directly with them. UIs are the human abstraction layer to compute. Claude code and Codex let us communicate directly like we always wanted.
Mostly, though there's also something to the (very light) UI of Claude code to me. You can off-road by just talking to it, but there's also enough there to be able to flip through more common stuff very quickly, it a way that seems to ease the burden of it being an almost blank white page.
Great post. I'd be curious to know what you think of Cursor in this continuum of experience
Generally, I like it a lot as a product, and it's been very useful, but I don't think it has the same effect? Like, I find it more useful than Claude code (or more effective for doing what I want to do), which I'm a little bummed by, because I want to *use* Claude code.
Which is maybe an interesting angle here, that the sorta emotional thing really isn't about productivity. Being productive and all is great, but I'm more viscerally drawn to something else. Which is sort of obvious - tiktok is addictive and almost completely useless - but also a little counterintuitive, because we tend to think that productivity software should first and foremost be productive. I'm not sure that's actually the case though.
video games might be the only exception, as software capable of evoking great emotion
Fair, though how much of that is the story of the game, versus the feeling of the gameplay itself? (I'm not a video game guy, so I honestly don't know)
I have always thought that the ideal interface is a combination of command line and GUI. When using either it often turns out that parts of the other would useful depending on what you are doing.