CLI all the things
As a terminal nerd I prefer working in the CLI over bloated web apps (looking at you, Jira and friends). The browser is where tools go to become slow, stateful, and impossible to compose — a well-designed CLI stays fast, scriptable, and honest about what it does.
TUIs are my friends
Full-screen terminal UIs hit the sweet spot between raw commands and GUIs: interactive like an app, but they live in my terminal and speak its language.
- lazygit — Git without the ceremony
- gh-dash — GitHub PRs/issues dashboards without the Jira-grade web app
- k9s — Kubernetes clusters at a glance
- WTF — personal dashboard of everything (glanceable panels in one screen)
- tmux / zellij — sessions, panes, and the workspace around the tools; might even look into herdr in the future
CLI as the AI-agent primitive
(Dedicated deep dive: CLIs for agents — the design rules, the cf/Forge reference, and the vault instances.)
In the AI-agents era, CLIs are the well-integrated layer: agents drive processes, not browsers. Paired with the right agent skills and JSON output, a CLI becomes a great primitive — a building block of real workflows. Structured output turns a one-off command into a composable step: parse, branch, chain, retry, automate.