The Command Line Is My New Operating System.

Something unexpected happened when I started working with AI tools seriously. I didn't move towards more visual, more polished, more designed interfaces. I moved backwards - or what looks like backwards - to the command line. As my good friend Colin Burns said recently - 30 years of interaction design and we've ended up back where we started?

The terminal is now where I spend most of my working day. Not because I am a programmer in the traditional sense. I am not. But because the command line, augmented by a language model, has become the most expressive environment I have ever worked in.

The paradox of power

For decades, the story of computing was about making things easier to use. The graphical user interface. The mouse. Multi-touch. Each generation of interface traded power for accessibility. You could do less, but more people could do it.

The command line was a relic. The thing that only systems administrators and developers touched. Their power was in speaking its language - knowing the right words, in the right order, with the right syntax. It was powerful but exclusionary.

But LLMs have flipped the switch. The command line now speaks my language! It has suddenly become the most direct way to express intent. No menus to navigate. No buttons to find. No workflow to learn. I just say what I mean.

And I'm using it for more than code and admin - I find myself driving my mac through it - engaging with the web through it, sharing my thoughts through it, writing in it. I've been building a number of AI Agents that each help run a part of my life - the command line is the first interface I want to design them for. Not web. Not mobile. And no-one is more surprised about this than me.

Working in conversation

What I do now is closer to conversation than operation. I describe a problem. The model helps me understand it. We iterate on a solution. The artefact - code, a document, an analysis - emerges from the dialogue.

This is not the same as delegating. I am not (always) handing tasks to an assistant and walking away. I am thinking with the tool. The model catches things I miss. It remembers syntax I forget. It suggests approaches I would not have considered. But the direction, the judgement, the taste - those remain mine.

The important thing is that this mode of working is not available through a chat window on a website. It requires the tool to be embedded in my actual working environment, with access to my files, my context, my history. The command line provides that. A browser tab does not.

What this means for the rest of us

I think this pattern is going to spread. Not the command line specifically, but the principle: AI does not necessarily push us towards more abstraction and more visual polish. Sometimes it pushes us towards more directness and more precision.

The people who will benefit most from AI tools are not necessarily the most technical. They are the people who can articulate what they want most clearly. The interface rewards clarity of thought, not knowledge of syntax. That is a profound shift.

We spent thirty years making interfaces that required less of people. We are now entering a period where the best interfaces require more - more clarity, more specificity, more willingness to engage in a back-and-forth process. The irony is that this feels less like using a computer and more like working with a colleague.

The command line might not be the future for everyone. But the principle it represents - direct expression of intent, minimal abstraction, maximum context - is going to reshape how all of us work with machines.