[tptacek]

What does it matter how fragmented the platforms are? I feel like this isn't sinking in with people. I was chatting with a friend last night about a SwiftUI app that I'd built and he'd pitched in on. He then reimplemented --- didn't port it, reimplemented it, for WinUI, that night, with just a couple prompts.

I am, in a proverbial sense, buying puts on Electron.

[nzoschke]

I agree, the LLM porting things is a game changer.

Does it also follow that we can have pretty much any shape for valuable apps? API, CLI, TUI, Web, SwiftUI, WinUI...

[tptacek]

Yes. Developers are conditioned to expect the only convenient answer is a TUI (actually, a CLI; TUIs are show-off projects most of the time) and, if you really want to go all out, Electron. That's not the case anymore.

[nzoschke]

I'm with you here.

In the "before times" an API and web UI that double times as native via Electron was the biggest bang for your buck.

CLI would be a hacker's side project, TUI would be them showing off more. Native would require hiring a team of specialists which is a total non-starter.

In the "after times" API and CLI are getting more love rebranded as MCP and tools.

To the parent topic, I suspect "build a TUI around my CLI" is a slam dunk for an LLM text in / text out machine which is why there is a resurgence of these too.

Hopefully that is the gateway drug to "build a SwiftUI around this", and an antidote to doing everything in Electron.

[dragonwriter]

LLM reimplementations for parallel versions are going to be fun to maintain, eepecially when AI market maturity ends the era of AI firms subsidizing coding tools as part of their marketshare competition efforts.

[tptacek]

If you think it’s all a house of cards, obviously none of my arguments hold. I’m not going to hedge that every time I write anything that intersects with AI though.

[dragonwriter]

> If you think it’s all a house of cards, obviously none of my arguments hold.

I don't think its all a house of cards; LLMs are real technology with real utility, in coding and lots of other domains.

They are also massively and unsustainably subsidized for certain uses (and the increasing crackdowns on repurposing the subsidized services for other uses should make it clear to anyone that the subsidies are unsustainable, and that there is a very clear focus on owning certain markets before when the music stops motivating them.)

[dlivingston]

Sure, for small projects. Otherwise, you'd better have a solid plan in place for keeping your business logic in a common core, otherwise you'll just be writing N separate implementations where N = number of target platforms.

Even in a world of agents, less code = better code.

[tptacek]

Sure, I hear this (with current models). But consider the UX complexity of a typical TUI. Even with a TUI framework, you end up with serious coding lifts just to get things that the all the current native UI frameworks give you for free.