UX Without a UI: Notes from Researching Terminal UX for Opik MCP

Opik, an open-source LLM observability and evaluation platform from Comet, is exploring how to bring trace analysis from its web dashboard into developers’ terminals, where many AI builders increasingly work alongside coding agents. An experiment created terminal-based waterfall charts for varied agent traces, including latency spikes, retry storms, and cascading failures, but highlighted major limitations of terminal and agent-mediated interfaces: output may be summarized or omitted by an LLM, terminal widths are uncertain, interactive features and persistent navigation are unavailable, colors may fail to render, and large datasets require editorial choices about what to show. The work also revealed that terminal tools serve two audiences with different needs—humans benefit from concise visual summaries, while LLMs interpret raw structured data more accurately than text charts. Suggested design principles include making renders self-contained and referable, designing for monochrome first, avoiding fixed widths, preserving readable text when clipping, and ensuring models can discover and use tools reliably. Although the terminal can function as a useful entry point, its static, scrollable output does not yet match the ideal of a live, glanceable cockpit, making reliability of delivery and integration a greater challenge than visual design itself.

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