Design a delightful TUI reading experience for an Economist CLI (Go/Bubble Tea)
Session from economist-tui-sessions on Hugging Face by thomasmustier · MIT · condensed by Coders Talk
Explore how to make the existing economist-cli feel like naturally browsing The Economist from a terminal, then design and document (and prototype) a richer TUI experience grounded in the Economist's official design system.
- +0Prompt · +0Read the codebase for context but don't touch code yet; think about what would make browsing The Economist from the TUI feel delightful.
- +0mAgent did · +0mExplored the repo structure, README, cmd/browse.go and internal/ui styles, then proposed a vision: split-view sidebar + headlines + in-app reader instead of quit-to-read.
- +2mPrompt · +2mGreat, let's start prototyping.
- +2mAgent did · +2mBuilt a new internal/tui package (styles, model, commands) with bubbles/list and viewport, rewired cmd/browse.go to use it, fixing build errors (missing go.sum entries, unused imports, type errors) along the way until it compiled.
- +7mAgent did · +7mSummarized the new unified sidebar/headline/in-app-reader TUI as a big improvement over the old quit-to-read flow.
- +8mFail · +8mRan `./economist browse leaders` and found the new TUI badly implemented.
- +9mIntervention · +9mTold the agent to revert all the TUI changes and instead write down the intent in a markdown doc, being careful not to touch parallel ongoing work.Why: It wasn't working well and I didn't want to risk breaking other in-flight work, so I asked to revert and just capture the plan in writing instead.
- +10mAgent did · +10mWrote DELIGHTFUL_EXPERIENCE_INTENT.md, restored the original cmd/browse.go, deleted internal/tui, and rebuilt cleanly.
- +18mPrompt · +18mSwitched from Gemini to Claude. Review the Economist design system site and the frontend-design skill.
- +18mAgent did · +18mUsed agent-browser and web search tools to review the Economist design system (colors, typography, grid, components, patterns) plus external readability research on line length and multi-column layouts, then consolidated everything into a canonical docs/TUI_DESIGN.md merging prior intent/plan documents, readability findings, color/typography mappings, ASCII mockups, state machine, and Go code sketches.
- Break · 38m away, not counted
- +36mOutcome · +36mEnded with a single canonical docs/TUI_DESIGN.md (~562 lines) capturing design system research, readability research, and an implementation plan; no TUI code was merged into the app itself.
Next time I'd start by asking for a design/research doc first and only prototype code once that's reviewed, since the first TUI attempt got built too fast and had to be thrown away. The intervention that mattered was telling the agent to revert the broken TUI and just document its intent instead of trying to patch it live, which kept the working app safe while we figured out the right design. Ending on a single canonical markdown doc rather than half-finished code was the right call for this session.