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thoughtfulchrisyesterday at 5:24 AM1 replyview on HN

I agree, agents struggle with TUIs. I do think this is easy to fix though (here's an interesting approach: https://github.com/remorses/ghostty-opentui). I think agents will have much better luck with TUIs than browsers.

The more interesting scenario IMO is having apps that are both TUIs AND CLIs where the agent uses the CLI but can pause and show the user a TUI for complex tasks where the user needs to input something.


Replies

jcglyesterday at 12:33 PM

> I think agents will have much better luck with TUIs than browsers.

I’m very skeptical. Why would you think that? TUIs inherently don’t provide programmatically accessible affordances; if they have any affordances at all, they’re purely visual cues that have unstandardized and of varying quality.

Compare that to the DOM in a browser where you’ve got numerous well-understood mechanisms to convey meaning and usability. Semantic HTML and ARIA roles. These things systematically simplify programmatic consumption.