But does it need a UI?
This has been on my mind a lot lately: whether or not a given piece of software needs a UI.
It's a presumed default nowadays, but I'm finding a lot of situations where I'm saying "I don't need a UI for that."
Today, I was wiring up the last few pieces of the blog for Fortivibe.
My default instinct was to build an admin UI (I let Claude slap together a bivouac for testing last week), but then I stopped and realized I could skip that and just load markdown (w/ frontmatter for metadata) files from disk.
Even better, doing so allowed me to skip the database hullaballoo and cache the blog in memory on server startup. Reads are effectively instant to the naked eye and I saved myself the time of having to build yet-another-neglected-ui.
That sweet, sweet SEO traffic (GEO, I suppose now) is mine.
The only downside is I need to deploy to publish, but I kind of like how that adds a constraint that forces me to be more thoughtful about what I publish. There's a built-in roadblock.
This got me thinking about a lot of stuff where, maybe a UI would be nice to have but isn't necessary. A simple hack of not defaulting to the status quo and seeing if there's a simpler, faster way to get what you need working/done.
Footnote: In case you're wondering, yes, I'd bundle TUIs into this, too, but I could understand an argument for situations where a TUI > GUI.
Disclaimer: YMMV.