Thomas Ptacek argues that even the smallest personal tools should have a truly native user interface, because coding agents have reduced the cost of building a sufficiently useful GUI to almost zero.
I wrote back in March about the macOS menu bar apps I built through vibe coding to monitor bandwidth and GPU usage, and I’m still using both of them every day.
I still haven’t gotten into the habit of building proper user interfaces for all my other projects, but I’m rapidly running out of excuses!
Thomas:
If you haven’t tried turning one of your 500 one-off CLI tools into a native app, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Build a native user interface. It might very well change the way you think.