Favorited Headless Everything For Personal AI by Matt Webb

I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until generative AI lowered their barrier to entry. Going from 0 to using the command line (which coincidentally is what it was until 30 years ago anyway). Even without AI, CLI tools, like Automator on Mac did before, allow the creation of workflows around a piece of software. Matt mentions the Obsidian CLI, and I’ve been using that to manipulate Tasks in Obsidian without going to the Obsidian UI. For about a decade I’ve treated application UIs as just views on my data, with functionality geared towards the viewing, and interfaces as different queries on that data. Going headless means removing the viewer, and using the output of queries directly programmatically. Combined with how I see the arch of generative AI bending significantly towards deterministic code, I look forward to the type of things people come up with. Not their tools, but what they come up with. Because the path to scale of these things imo is not adopting or buying what someone else made, but adopting what someone else came up with conceptually and creating your own local version. Like we do socially too, contagion spreading through effective behaviour, and culturally, the contextual and local sum of all time greatest hits of our group behaviour. The invisible hand of networks rather than markets. It would be highly ironic if unethical corporate extractive AI not only creates the incentive but also actually paves the way for the masses to Walkaway.

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. […] ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what they want is not APIs (which connect webservers) but little apps they can use directly. CLI tools are the perfect little apps.

Matt Webb