This was a thought experiment about UIs if the windows and mouse metaphor hadn’t taken off.

As developers we have the best of both worlds: direct visual manipulation, but also a language-centric control of richer objects in the terminal.

Being able to flip between these has always felt like a superpower.

LLMs, for better or worse, bring some of that capability to users who aren't fluent in scripting. It allows language centric control, but a couple more layers of abstraction up from direct coding, especially with the rise of agents.

Though, I do find that breaking down instructions into concrete specific steps and validating the LLM output is its own skill that is not too dissimilar to the mindset needed for coding.