Right? It’s been kind of funny watching everyone “rediscover” the terminal and I’m over here feeling like a true graybeard “silly kids, I’ve been here the whole time.”

What’s old is new again is apparently just as true in tech as it is in fashion.

The terminal was _always awesome_, the bar to realized that was just a tad high for many people. Until now!

here-doc usage has probably 100x-ed in the last year

It's 1,000,000,000,000x easy. Have found enough annoying bugs in powershells implementation of it that I know nobody is using it.

How so?

It's because the web developers who destroyed the web are now taking their mess with them into more obscure places, such as terminals, hardware and AI.

That's probably why it is so hyped up as it is right now.

Embrace, Embellish, Enshittify.

Why the hate against web developers?

Because of all the laggy javascript, wasting precious compute and gigawatts of power just to make buttons dance, track us and shove ads up ours?

Websites used to be below 100KiB - now they come with MEGABYTES of obfuscated JS.. wtf

Though obviously, it's not the individual developer to blame but the incentive system.

The HN zeitgeist has something of a love/hate relationship with the web, I've noticed. HN in general seems to skew a little older than a lot of online communities, so a lot of HN users were adults back in the early days of the web/Usenet/etc. There's a tendency to view those days with nostalgia, leading a lot of people to feel like the "good old days" of the web were "ruined" by the modern shift into more interactivity, fancier/prettier design, etc. And "web developers" are the ones proximately responsible for the shift, so they get the hate too.

I laugh every time I see someone on HN asserting that the web "shouldn't" be used for anything beyond "documents and lightly interactive content", which is not uncomment. There's some real old-man-yelling-at-clouds energy there.

It basically boils down to: (a) 90s web developers tended not to have computer science backgrounds and weren't aware of fundamentals -> (b) when js frameworks exploded in popularity and diversity in the 00s, there was much wheel reinventing, because those developers (and to a lesser degree framework inventors) were often ignorant of wheels -> (c) there are persistent, fundamental mistakes* in the web ecosystem that could have been fixed at the start if anyone with experience had been asked.

All of those people are now the vibe coders of the 20s, and it's going to end up in the same dumpster fire of 'Who knew it might be a good idea to cryptographically sign and control library packages in a public repository?'

* Note: I'm distinguishing things going sideways despite best intentions and careful planning from YOLO + 'Oops, how could that possibly have happened?' shit

Have you used the web recently? It’s a mess. Most sites don’t actually work well. Everything is slow and bloated and ad-filled, pulling hundreds of megs from hundreds of hosts to display a single page covered in popup alerts, subscription begs, cookie warnings, and paywalls.

Yeah it’s been amusing to see people rediscovering tmux as well

I think terminal workflows are intimidating for a lot of people, because the discoverability is lower than GUIs. You can't necessarily intuit how a CLI works, you have to read the documentation or watch a tutorial, which my 10 years in the IT industry has taught me a big barrier even for really experienced SWEs. The new coding TUIs are a more gentle introduction to that.

> ... because the discoverability is lower than GUIs.

The UI paradigm created by the emacs transient package [1] can improve the discoverability of CLI commands significantly. It's one of the components of magit, the famous git frontend, that makes it so awesome. It's discoverability is very close to that of GUIs and somehow even more pleasing to use than GUIs. I wonder if someone is trying this on terminals.

[1] https://github.com/magit/transient

I think people simply don't like to read or write. --help is probably as discoverable as it gets.

The program perhaps most responsible for the renewed interest in the terminal, Claude Code, is made with React. Life moves pretty fast.

I remember the first time I heard a girl use the word "lol" (early 2000s) and thought to myself: Normies have hit the internet.

I've used a terminal as my main interface FOREVER, and I'm amazed that people are joining this healthy habit of interacting with the computer as CREATORS.

Vibe coding is the first thing I’ve seen that has normies using the terminal