Terminal is Back
“I’ll be back.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator. Don’t know about the Terminator, but it turns out the terminal kept that promise.
Not a Medium member? Read the full story here
The early days
The year was 98. I was learning Pascal programming in college. Our lab machines all ran Linux. Windows 98 had just arrived in the world, but not in those labs.
Our code editors, you ask?
• vi in the terminal
• Turbo C’s editor, if you were lucky
• sometimes the old DOS edit command
Basically, one would stare at a blinking cursor with loads of documentation in the form of fat paper books or hastily scribbled class notes. The internet was new, but not easy to use then, and not available in the said labs.
The luxury of Notepad
Around the same time, I got my first Windows PC at home. Suddenly, I had Notepad. Which, at the time, felt like a luxury compared to wrestling with vi in the terminal.
I know that older people who used vi before Windows OS will talk at length about its elegance and performance. I acknowledge that vi is a pretty amazing editor, but it requires one to remember a lot of commands within the vi world.
Coding in the labs meant memorising commands, reading manuals, and fixing compiler errors line by line. Slow. Painfully slow.
For someone just starting out, even getting a “hello world” program to run without running into syntax errors first was a small victory.
The IDE era
A few years later, I started my first job as a programmer and got access to proper Windows based IDEs. I discovered Eclipse for Java programmers. With that, everything changed. It was and still is among my favourite IDEs.
Auto-complete. Visual debuggers. Refactoring tools. Navigation across thousands of files.
Developers got proper power tools, and most of us happily left the terminal behind. Not really, cause every now and then one needs to fire a command using the CLI. However, as a programmer, much of the time was spent in IDEs.
Fast forward 25 years
In recent years, my job has changed. I don’t write code every day as the main thing. Much of the time is spent ideating, talking about solutions, thinking about integrations, talking to customers, etc. I still like to write the occasional proof of concept or fun side project, but that’s not the main task.
So while I have been excited about all of the AI developments, my interactions with AIs were less about direct code.
Get vvs’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Over the past couple of months, that changed. I went solo hands-down mode again for a new project, and I found myself back in the terminal again. Ironically, the reason was very practical.
Like all devs who love their IDE, I was using Gemini chat inside VS Code (sorry, Eclipse, the integration with AI agents was just better). It defaulted to the latest model, went into a few heavy tool-calling and reasoning loops, and suddenly, my quota for the day was gone.
The frustrating part was simple: there was no reliable way to see quota usage. So I went searching online. That led me to Gemini CLI, which exposed usage clearly.
There, I could actually see usage and control what was happening. A side effect was that the terminal felt a lot more performant and less distracting compared to VS Code. So I stayed in the terminal.
Something clicked
Once I started working this way, I began experimenting with other CLI tools. Somewhere along the path, something clicked.
I realised that I was no longer typing code myself. There was mostly very little need for that. I describe what I want, review the code, and iterate.
It reminds me of that scene in The Matrix where the operator says:
“I don’t even see the code anymore.”
That’s a bit what this feels like.
I built a Chrome extension and a Flutter UI for it this way.
Not by replacing the developer in me, but by letting coding agents compress the distance between idea and working software.
I still use the IDE, of course, since as a human it is much more convenient to see and read code using the IDE. Just that I use it less to write code and more to review what is written.
The return of the blinking cursor
Twenty-five years later, the fastest interface I have for building something real… is once again that blinking cursor.
The tools changed. The workflow has changed.
But the terminal kept its promise.
The Terminal came back.
Curious — what was your first programming editor? vi? Turbo C? Notepad? Something even older? What AI tools are you dabbling with?
If you are not a follower, but you liked my writing and want to keep reading more about Software, Technology and AI, please consider following me.
