Terminal romantics (It feels like play)

There’s a specific feeling I remember from the early days of the internet — maybe 1993, 1994, somewhere in there. It was shortly after we moved to the US and bought our first computer. People were making things and trying things online just because: ASCII art. Chat bots. Personal homepages about, well, whatever, because you knew you just had to have a presence online, you knew you had to play in order to be a part of it all, to not get left behind. It was early enough that you got to try it all – BBSes, Gopher, WWW – so early that you didn’t know which of those methods to connect online was going to “win” (or, which would still be a cool, second place gathering spot). A lot of it was text-based and inside terminal interfaces.

It felt like play – a game.

I got that a little bit of that same feeling during the crypto years of 2020-2022. Everyone stuck inside during COVID, playing with money that didn’t feel quite real. (What’s the harm in trying stuff with house money?). Most of it seemed crazy (apes on a (blockchain) plane?) and some of it mattered (stablecoins). All of it had that same energy: people doing weird things because it was fun and the ceiling wasn’t visible yet.

The state of AI feels exactly like that for the past few months. Open a terminal, fire up claude or codex and start playing. Take cool ideas, half-baked concepts and try them out, just because. Text your openclaw agent anything and everything. You don’t necessarily know which approach or model or framework is the one that’s going to win, but you may as well play with them all. The cost to trying new ideas is low and so much fun to boot.

The only difference this time is the play is also the work.

The early internet was playful but the “useful” took probably the rest of the decade to arrive for everyone. Crypto was playful but for most people the useful arguably never really came. With AI, both are happening at the same time. We’re actually shipping ideas and features faster. Not a day goes by where a friends/parents group thread or team conversation isn’t talking about how to make the most of it. The game is producing real output.

By the way, given a lot of it is now happening in the terminal, I’d get your prompts to use Bubble Tea (or Gum) from the team at Charm. They make some really cool open-source tools for building beautiful terminal UIs. (* I am a small investor.)