Alexander Belanger Co-Founder · Hatchet
When I first booted up Claude Code in May 2025, I thought: huh, this is cute. A terminal-based coding agent...they must be pandering to developers.
Within the first 30 minutes, I was convinced: this was going to be huge. So huge that we at Hatchet discussed whether we should build a new product line around terminal-based coding agents.
Ultimately, we decided against it, but that first experience with Claude Code stuck with me. It seems so simple and obvious in hindsight that a terminal-based agent would have a incredibly fast adoption curve among developers.
Perhaps you have a similar feeling that the tool you're working on should have a TUI. Perhaps you've always wanted to build a TUI yourself. Or perhaps you just like saying too-ee.
I say: go for it. It's much easier than I was expecting, using a few neat tricks with Claude Code. This is coming from a skeptic. We had previously attempted an aggressive, agent-first refactor of our frontend which was built in a week, bug-bashed for five, then abandoned.
In comparison, this TUI was mostly driven by Claude Code, but was built and shipped in a few days. You can check it out a live demo here:
For all you budding TUI developers, I wanted to write out some of the decisions that made this significantly easier than similar projects of mine: a “happy path” to building a successful TUI application.
I've always wanted a TUI for Hatchet. Something like k9s, but for tasks and workflow runs. I wasn't sure anyone else would find it useful, and we didn't even really announce it to our community, but within a few days we got some very positive, unsolicited feedback from our users. For example:
Guys great work on the Hatchet CLI (especially the TUI!) It feels so [much more] performant than the UI.
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