"The CLI is Dead"

From Cursor dev Jediah Katz:

“the cli is dead - the big cli players are all pivoting. if you don’t believe me just wait”

If this means TUIs and traditional chat-over-CLI is the future over CLI tools - I think it’s backwards. Agents + CLIs + skills is the core of the future and nobody has figured out the right human interface for that yet.

But what does that human interface look like?

Is it chat?

Is it an extension of the desktop GUI for chat like GPT + Codex desktop?

The current gaps I see are:

1. Best practices and common templates to have an “AI native repo”

   • Needs a core agent-first environment: legibility, context engineering, validation loops as the primary motivator

2. An HCI that focuses on humans steering, not implementing

   • Reduce “cognitive debt” in the plan and completion stage to keep humans understanding the holistic system implementation
   • An up to date legible view of the system (visual explainers, agent traces)

3. 1 and 2 working together for a self improving system

   • “Continual learning” as augmenting context for a core systems level view of the app. Failure modes automatically captured and augmented as skills and tools

My guess is it’s IDEs at a higher level of abstraction, following the golden principle: humans steer, agents execute. What does the optimal steering UX look like?