> I think this is the argument for UIs

To quote The Godfather II, "This is the business we have chosen."

The most popular and important command line tools for developers don't have the consistency that Claude Code's command line interface does. One reason Claude Code became so popular is because it worked in the terminal, where many developers spend most of their time. But using tools like Claude Code's CLI is a daily occurrence for many developers. Some IDE's can be just as difficult to use.

For people who don’t use the terminal, Claude Code is available in the Claude desktop app, web browsers and mobile phones. There are trade-offs, but to Anthropic’s credit, they provide these options.

I used to think UIs would be better for agents, but I changed my mind: UIs suit traditional software very well because there are only X actions that can be performed - it makes sense that if you have an image converter that can take X, Y and Z formats and convert them to A, B and C then you should have a UI that limits what the user can do, preventing them from making mistakes and making it obvious what's possible.

But for something like Claude Code there are unlimited things you can do with it, so it's better for them to accept a free-form input.

not really, mostly its self explanatory, it has poweruser things that are discoverable within a few minutes of reading the help. Weirdly the cheat sheet is actually missing things that you can find inside claudes help like /keybinds .