UX Without a UI: Designing Terminal Experiences for an Agent-First Product
dl_weekly · x · 2026-10-13
Comet UX researcher Jolanta Marczewska describes designing terminal experiences for Opik's MCP: developers treat the terminal as a cockpit and don't want to jump back to a web dashboard, so product UX must flow between terminal and UI.
Using a coding agent, she built a renderer that turns trace data into a terminal waterfall chart, tested on 10 deliberately varied traces (latency spikes, retry storms, cascading failures) via both a slash command and an LLM tool call.
Key principles: the terminal is a page, not a screen; design for humans and agents simultaneously; structure information as text that both can consume despite unpredictable LLM behavior.
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