Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.

Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.

So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.

I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.

Get a new business model or close the site. Nobody has the right to do whatever they feel like to make money, no matter the impact on other people.

It was just fine when most websites were academic or hobby content, not businesses.

If LLMs help me never use a front end owned/dictated by a corporation again it'll be no bad thing, regardless of the quality of the code they write.

Let information be free for personal and recreational uses[0], and vote for governments that will fund the arts. The corporations will be just fine.

[0] The AI companies and big tech vs publishers, music labels, etc. can fight to the death in the courts over who owes who what, for all I care.

Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.

I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.

AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.

Tax excess tech profits that derive from the efforts of others and use the proceeds to fund living artists.

Vaguely analogous to levies on blank cassettes that went to offset piracy. Give the money directly to actual artists, not labels/publishers, though.

There are multiple real examples of both, even in America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row

There’s no reason that the cost of something you need “must be recouped” in future by you having and using that thing.

UK list, for example: https://www.air-shows.org.uk/2025/04/uk-airshow-calendar-202...

Rest of Europe: https://www.air-shows.org.uk/2025/04/european-airshow-calend...

As I said, I believe people have a right to "adversarial interoperability", so I respectfully disagree

They should have no rights to control how people use hardware they bought. ToS for hardware should simply be unenforceable.

People should have full rights to adversarial interoperability, even if it means modifying proprietary software or hardware.

It always surprises me when people (on this site particularly) are more interested in the law as it stands than how things could or should be.

I wonder whether tech has become so exploitative partly because so many of us have lost track of (or never understood) how important civil disobedience has always been in the process of democracy and securing our rights.

As an individual you really don’t have to follow the terms of service! You certainly don’t have to support the [ab]use of ToS, DRM and related tech to screw you at every opportunity!

Sounds like a feature, not a bug

I've managed to get OpenCode setup such that I can have a productive discussion about the design or an issue / change then leave the LLM iterating for long periods while I do other work. It's instructed to maintain test coverage and treat quality very seriously - as a result there are over 5000 tests (some I suspect are useless...) and it's pretty rare to get a regression.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of significant bugs and gaps, but also that once found it seems like all of them will be fixed pretty quickly by the LLM.

I just have to avoid looking at the code...