AI is taking us back to an interface that is all too familiar to the investment banker archetype: the command line.
First thing you're taught as a first-year analyst is to lose your dependency on the mouse, no pointing and clicking. Keyboard shortcuts are your friend. That goes for Excel, but it also holds true for the Bloomberg Terminal – the quintessential command line interface navigable through a series of functions you input in the prominent command bar at the top of the screen. It's fast and efficient but born out of hardware constraints. Debuting in the 1980s, the Bloomberg Terminal was a product of an era when graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were not as advanced or widespread as they are today. The command line interface was a crutch, not a design choice. But in its wake, it gave way to a text-dense interface and hundreds of functions accessible through keyboard commands.
When Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, declared it "the year of Agents" in January, my expectation was that we'd witness the next breakthrough in user interface design for this new era of computing. There was instead a regression to the command line. This manifested in tools like Claude Code, and the onslaught of other coding assistants that launched in the months that followed. The consumer interface for these agents is yet to manifest; for now, it's an amalgamation of blank canvases with chat boxes tacked on. But for the Bloomberg terminal-pilled, the agents live in text-based interfaces, and it just makes sense. There's a reason why Excel has endured all these years, and why the Bloomberg Terminal is irreplaceable; it's the power of the keyboard and all the shortcuts that come with it.
GUIs are built for consumers; a glossy wrap over general purpose applications where animations, navigation menus, and the iconography are essential for a seamless user experience. That works well for iphone apps, web apps, and everything else in between. The best UIs don't ask much from the user – open instagram and you're served with an algorithmically curated feed of reels that you didn't curate yourself, swipe anywhere and you get somewhere. The caveat with the current paradigm of "agents" is that they do ask for input from the user, which is something most users are bad at, and that's why they are yet to take off in consumer software. For the bankers and software engineers, they have a knack for monospace fonts on dark backgrounds, crammed text and keyboard shortcuts; they thrive on it.
The future UI is still an unsolved question, but for finance, it's always been there.