I think TUI's are popular because they're easier to make than a GUI. They are much more constrained. A TUI is basically a wire frame with some colours, whereas with a GUI the wireframe is only the first step.

Are you sure about that? Most GUI toolkits have things so wired up that it’s trivial to get a small app running. The point is to get a dev up and running as quickly as possible (even if there is a lot of magic involved). If you’re okay with the defaults, it ca be very quick to get a GUI up and running.

In contrast, most TUI toolkits generally require the developer to wire things up manually. Maximum developer flexibility, but with a decent learning curve. Having an LLM available to handle the initial wiring definitely speeds things up.

I know I had a few long lasting bugs with a TUI I wrote years ago that Claude was able to find the fix for pretty quickly. These were bugs that weren’t obvious to me, partially due to the arcane nature of working within a TUI.