> I think if you look purely at the numbers, the real reason TUIs are popular is claude code

Do you mean that TUIs are popular because everyone is now trying to imitate Claude Code? or because TUIs are now easier to develop when Claude Code exists?

Likely combination of both.

CC demonstrated that one can have a powerful, flexible and responsive interface in a terminal, and to have that for a piece of software that has wide mass market appeal. I don't think we've seen this since WP5.1 . (Personal opinion: the CC terminal application beats their desktop software hands down in usability. That said, the desktop software is a lot better for corporate email trawls and helping to iterate on visualisations.)

Then for prospective devs, CC makes it easy to sling (and debug!) code that handles the various terminal vagaries with much less headache. No need to care about manually maintaining control code state machines; no worries about a missed SIGWINCH handler screwing up your in-window layout on resize or font size change; much easier integration with available CLI tools.

I have written some ncurses/C code in my time. I wouldn't want to do that by hand again.