Stop Making TUIs

Simon Willison, a software developer, reports that he continues to use two macOS task bar apps he built with vibe-coded SwiftUI in March, and he endorses Thomas Ptacek's advice that developers should turn their throwaway command-line interfaces into native apps, saying it will likely change the way they think.

I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/27/vibe-coding-swiftui/ , and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis. I'm not habitually knocking out real UIs for my other projects yet, but I'm running out of excuses Thomas: If you haven’t tried your hand at turning one of your 500 throwaway CLIs into a native app, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Go build a native UI. It’ll probably change the way you think. Tags: thomas-ptacek https://simonwillison.net/tags/thomas-ptacek , ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai , generative-ai https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai , llms https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms , vibe-coding https://simonwillison.net/tags/vibe-coding , coding-agents https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents