The Return of the Command Line

Back in the day when computers were still just for nerds, like God intended it, you typed arcane commands to do stuff. LOAD "*",8 comes back to me instantly after all these years; IYKYK, as the kids say now.

What helped shove computing into the mainstream was the rise of the graphical user interface, famously developed at Xerox PARC, then ‘perfected’ by Apple, then ‘re-perfected’ by Microsoft. No more typing of commands, just point and click, and then later, just touch.

But if you’ve ever gotten extremely familiar with a system that can accept keyboard input, you’ll know how fast and smooth operations can be when you don’t need to take your hands off the keyboard. You can find a very deep state of flow, and having to ‘interrupt’ that state to use the mouse and then visually find something and click on it can feel like a major irritation. When I worked as an editor at various newspapers in Ireland they all used the same publishing platform, and I knew it so well I could manipulate the menus with the keyboard faster than the eye could read them. I’ve seen other people use Photoshop and Excel the same way.

The trouble is that it takes a LOT of time to get to that level of capability. You need to learn all the product’s little quirks and ways of doing things.

But AI, as you may have noticed, is taking us in strange new directions. To get an AI-driven system to do something, you don’t need to learn any commands any more -- you just tell it what you want in natural language. And soon enough, you won’t need to learn any product quirks any more, either, because you will just describe what you want to happen and the system will do it.

I have previously written about the magical feeling of using Claude Code, and the sense of power and delight it gives me to be able to tell the system to generate something in code, and have it generate that thing. Watching it use tools and fix errors and reason through things to achieve my aims makes me ‘feel the AGI’, as we said in the early days of AI, about six weeks ago.

I think that feeling is so powerful that it’s going to be addictive for people. Plus, there is going to be an explosion of capability in those systems. First, they’re going to get connected to a multitude of MCP-enabled agents to do a vast range of new tasks. And second, if the precise thing that you want for your personal needs does not exist, the system will just create it for you. ChatGPT and its companions have already shown us that people are much more text-friendly than the rise of TikTok et al might have led you to believe.

The result of all this could well be that the command line makes a surprise resurgence, because people will be able to just quickly type things into it one after the other, and get both the sense of uninterrupted flow and unlimited power. Email John and ask him about tomorrow’s presentation. Check my Slack, did Anne message? What time is my flight next Monday? Where is [my wife / friend / coworker lover] right now? Ping them and ask. What’s the weather at the weekend? Add a to-do to check in with Dan on the thing. Open that doc I started before lunch. What did I email Alice that I would include in Project Z?

And on and on. Answers popping up as text responses (‘I’ve emailed John, I’ll let you know when he responds’) or visual UX (for the weather, the doc) as needed. And most of all: glorious, uninterrupted focus -- no pop-ups, no banner ads, no requests to sign up for newsletters, no moving the mouse and reading UIs and looking for things on the screen to click on like a caveperson. Pretty much every webpage in existence has multiple things on it all clamouring for your attention, but the command line doesn’t. It just helps you do one thing at a time quickly and efficiently.

I think it’s time for the return of a very old friend.