I was scrolling through my feed recently when I saw something that felt like a glitch in the simulation. A developer had built a terminal emulator called "Ratty" a GPU-accelerated, 3D environment where the cursor is a spinning 3D rat and you can literally tilt your entire workspace in 3D space like a PS2 game.
It was weird. It was "useless" in the most beautiful way. But as I watched those 3D objects render inside a terminal, it hit me this insight:
We have spent forty years running away from the terminal, only to realize we might have just accidentally abandoned one of our most important collaborators behind.
The Great Human-Centric Detour
The core issue isn't that we want 3D elements in our terminal; it’s how we've navigated multiple revolutions to perfect user interface frameworks for humans, while completely ignoring AI as the next great user class. In our obsession with making software accessible to ourselves, we never bothered to design UIs that are friendly for them.
