[andrewpareles]

Just want to share our thinking on terminal-based tools!

We think in 1-2 years people will write code at a systems level, not a function level, and it's not clear to us that you can do that with text. Text-based tools like Claude Code work in our text-based-code systems today, but I think describing algorithms to a computer in the future might involve more diagrams, and terminal will not be ideal. That's our reasoning against building a tool in the terminal, but it clearly works well today, and is the simplest way for the labs to train/run terminal tool-use agents.

[bcrosby95]

Diagrams are great at providing a simplified view of things but they suck ass when it comes to providing details.

There's a reason why fully creating systems from them died 20 years ago - and it wasn't just because the code gen failed. Finding a bug in your spec when its a mess of arrows and connections can be nigh impossible.

Go image search "complex unreal blueprint".

[andrewpareles]

This is completely true, and it's a really common objection.

I don't imagine people will want to fully visualize codebases in a giant unified diagram, but I find it hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews that at least stray from plaintext in some way.

I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

[ayewo]

> I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

Sounds exactly like what DeepWiki is doing from the Devin AI Agent guys: https://deepwiki.com

[abnercoimbre]

Terminals aren't too far away from evolving [0] beyond UTF-8 characters. Therefore I suspect IDEs and CLIs will continue their turf wars as always.

> hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews

100% agreed here.

Disclosure: I'm the author of the project below.

[0] https://terminal.click

[1dom]

FYI, this is currently a dead link - wasn't sure if typo, so googled and confirmed, looks like you're down at the moment. Hopefully not a painful fix on a Sunday.

[conartist6]

You have lost all connection to reality.

Hey by the way I hear all communication between people is going to shift to pictograms soon. You know -- emoji and hieroglyphs. Text just isn't ideal, you know

[km144]

Every system can be translated can be translated to text though. If there is one thing LLMs have essentially always been good at, it is processing written language.