Even a tiny personal tool can have a proper interface

Thomas Ptacek’s provocation, picked up by Simon: try giving one of those throwaway command-line tools a native interface.

The argument is about development cost. A small utility no longer needs to justify weeks of interface work before it can have buttons, menus and a window. Coding agents can make a usable first version cheap enough to try.

Simon’s own supporting evidence is modest and tangible: the macOS menu-bar tools he built for bandwidth and GPU monitoring were still in daily use months later.

The question for the next personal utility is no longer just “Can this work in a terminal?” It is whether the interface makes the recurring task easier.