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Yuchen Jin says AI agents are replacing terminals as the coding interface

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Yuchen Jin argues that terminals, built around files, commands, and processes, are giving way to AI agents where users state intent and the agent operates the machine. He says understanding Linux and systems fundamentals remains valuable as a moat.

In a follow-up, he calls the terminal era over for coding agents, saying persistent context matters more than tabs, and names the Codex desktop app as the best agentic UI for now.

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@Yuchenj_UW

I was a terminal person for 15+ years.

I loved Vim, knew all the shortcuts, and a black terminal made me feel like I was a cool hacker in The Matrix.

But terminals assume humans operate computers directly via files, commands, processes.

Agents changed all that.

You just say your intent. The agent operates the machine, using the same programming languages and Linux commands we spent years learning.

I’m still glad I learned computer systems before the AI era though. Understanding what sits beneath the abstraction makes you a better systems thinker.

That’s a moat in the AI era.

Yuchen Jin@Yuchenj_UW
I haven’t touched Claude Code or Codex CLI in a while. The terminal era is over imo. It's the wrong interface for coding agents. Tabs are ephemeral, but context is persistent, and managing 30 tabs is pure cognitive overhead. I don’t really need an IDE like Cursor either. I rarely navigate the whole codebase anymore. The new primitive is the agent, not the file. (Codex desktop app is the best agentic UI for now. But we’re still early.)
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