The Second Coming of the Command Line

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In The Beginning

Every time your right pinky slams that ENTER key, you are making another try. In some cases the [coding agent] does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces something like emacs.

— Adapted from Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

At the end of his novella In the Beginning Was The Command Line, Neal Stephenson imagines a cosmic operating system, with some hacker-demiurge pounding out universes with commands like:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....

He imagines:

Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing…

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

For the last six months or so, every hacker (the old school kind) has been living out this fantasy: putting the slot machine crank of AI coding agents in a loop and spitting out universes of code.

I find it striking that over twenty, almost thirty, years later, one of the most advanced technologies humankind has produced to date makes its grand appearance to the world as command-line interface (CLI) programs with terminal user interfaces (TUI). I’m not sure how long this terminal renaissance will last, but even if we eventually mediate our experience down to one big button that says “CODE” (or in Stephenson’s galactic example “LIVE”), under the hood still exist all those command line parameters turning plain text into tokens and back again.

Yes, it’s the second coming of the command line and I’m here for it.

As we claw our way to the rapture of the singularity, I want to pause (if such a thing is possible in today’s environment) to consider how we got here, what lessons we can take from the fact that the CLI and text won (again), and what that hints for the future.

Fire up your RSS reader That’s still a thing, right? and follow along.

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Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

J. Aaron Farr

CTO, Co-Founder of Jam & Tea Studios — building AI-native games.

What I Write About

AI + Games: The intersection of machine learning and game development
Game Development: From video games to tabletop RPGs
AI/ML Engineering: Practical lessons from building with AI/ML
Occasionally: Engineering leadership, startups, open source practices

⊕ I’m a father and husband living in Los Angeles. Some know me from my soujourn in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of China. I had the privilege of being an early contributor, and board member, of the Apache Software Foundation. These days, I build games and tech as part of Jam & Tea Studios

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