[wrs]

I've used at least a few GUIs that automatically generated a log of commands corresponding to your GUI actions, which you could observe, replay, or copy into a script. The only one I can think of right now is the Active Directory Administrative Center [0], with its "history viewer" that shows the PowerShell command equivalent of everything you do. I think another one was SQL-related. Anyway, this is one way you can "reify" a GUI that happens to correspond to an equivalently powerful CLI.

(Edit) Another example of reification is the Google Cloud Console, where you can go through a webpage for a complicated operation like creating a VM, but instead of pressing Save, you can click a link to see the equivalent gcloud CLI command and HTTP API request. I've used this a lot to script bulk operations after generating one outline for a request.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-...

[rcxdude]

Blender does this, and I've also used an FPGA IDE which had the same feature. I think it's pretty useful, but both have holes where there's actions in the GUI which don't work properly in the script.