We have a new generation of AI tools that make accessible to everyone the knowledge that was previously required when computers didn’t have graphical user interfaces and only those who were passionate about technology would acquire it. It is the power of the command line that unlocks possibilities in the use of your computer that you didn’t know you had.

The Evolution of Computer Interfaces

Before Microsoft Windows and Mac OS popularized the more user-friendly graphical interface, personal computers had to be managed through character-based terminal windows, with a series of operating system commands that you had to learn and were not intuitive at all. The desktop metaphor gives you a folder, and you double-click to open it to see the files and eventual additional folders it contains. Before that, you had to remember, for example under Microsoft DOS, that the command to change directory was CD and the command to see the content of a directory was DIR.

Installing a new program required configuring it, launching it, saving your files, all using these specialized commands that you had to learn and remember, including their parameters. This was a limiting factor in the diffusion of personal computers because, despite the benefits they would gain, many people simply didn’t want to learn how to use the command line.

The Age of Graphical User Interfaces

The graphical user interfaces with the desktop metaphor made personal computers accessible to hundreds of millions and now billions of people. However, they also presented a singular approach on how computers should be used. So much so that very few successful applications dare to deviate from even something as simple as the way drop-down menus and the particular composition of the dialogues function.

An example of an application that did make different choices is Adobe Photoshop. To this day, it is perceived to be difficult to use not because it is intrinsically challenging but because it is different from the standard interface paradigm recommended by the operating system vendors.

The vast majority of people use their computers without even knowing that beneath the graphical user interface lies another layer, a very powerful one, that allows them to do things that go way beyond what the comfortable cages of their applications let them do. And that is the way it should be because the power of the command line can also be very dangerous. If you learn a file can be deleted with a given command rm and that you can apply that recursively on files and folders with the -rf option, you really have to pay attention otherwise you could delete everything on your computer with a single thoughtless command. There is no trashcan to recover the files that you inadvertently deleted.

Command Line Beyond Your Computer

The command line empowers the use not only of your own computer to do things beneath the graphical metaphor, but also a lot of online remote systems. Besides offering a browser-based interface, many services provide a command line interface (CLI) as well. If the percentage of people who are ready to learn the commands to manage their own computers is relatively small, those that are ready to do so for online services is even smaller.

The Third Way: AI-Powered Natural Language Interfaces

Today, however, there is a new third way to use computers that overcomes the limitations of this specialized knowledge, making it accessible to everyone. It is the ability to use our computers with natural language offered by artificial intelligence. More and more of our tools offer access to AI that you can just have a conversation with or even talk to with your voice. As this becomes commonplace, it can be applied to activities that you would do through the graphical user interface or the command line if you knew how to do it yourself.

This can be something as simple as renaming a bunch of files. For example, you might have downloaded a series of images from your phone or from the internet, and they naturally will have all kinds of different unintelligible names. But you want to change those names to reflect the location or the event that the image is related to, along with the date. If you had a specialized application for managing photos, it might support this, but most likely not. Or if you knew how to do it, you could create a little program with the commands of your operating system.

The likelihood that you knew how to do this or that you would have the patience or the time not only to write but also to debug that little program is small. So most likely either you would do it manually if the number of files to rename is sufficiently small (up to perhaps one or two dozen), or you simply wouldn’t bother.

But now you can just use an intelligent terminal or an integrated development environment enhanced with AI. Explain what you want to do, and the AI will go ahead and do it.

Real-World Applications

Consider WordPress, which powers more than 40% of the world’s websites. WordPress offers a very user-friendly web-based interface to both design websites and add pages or posts. It is also very modular with an amazingly large number of plugins that enhance and extend its functionality to the point that it can easily become too complex for someone who is not dedicated to managing it.

Well, WordPress provides a command-line interface to make any kind of changes you want on your website. With AI assistance, you don’t have to learn the commands, parameters, and details around it, you can simply accomplish what you want through natural language.

Looking Forward

We are very much at the beginning of this new conversational interface that makes available the power of the command line to everyone again. It will only get better and more integrated into our daily computing experiences.

There is also, naturally enough, another category of tools even more recent that instead of implementing what you want through commands in the operating system will manipulate the graphical elements on your screen for you. These AI agents that can navigate interfaces on your behalf represent yet another paradigm shift in how we interact with computers. (I will discuss them more in detail in the near future.)

Tools to Try Today

If you want to experiment with what I’ve described, here are some tools I currently enjoy using:

Warp Terminal

Warp reimagines the terminal as a modern application. It features AI-assisted command completion, natural language command generation, and collaborative features that make the command line more accessible without sacrificing power. Its AI can help you translate your natural language requests into proper commands, bridging the gap between what you want to do and the syntax required to do it.

Windsurf IDE (The Integrated Development Environment)

Windsurf combines traditional code editing capabilities with AI assistance that understands not just your code but your intent. You can describe in plain language what you’re trying to accomplish, and the AI will help generate, modify, or debug code accordingly. It’s particularly useful for those times when you know what you want to achieve but aren’t sure how to implement it in code.

Both of these tools do much more than what I’ve highlighted here, but even just experimenting with their AI-assisted features will give you a taste of this new paradigm of computer interaction. The power of the command line, once reserved for the technically inclined, is being democratized through natural language interfaces, opening up new possibilities for everyone.