[reb]

This isn't inherent, just a side effect of poorly designed text UI. Suggestions on the input, manual commands, or honest answers in response to the question "what can you do" all do as good a job as a GUI does, and sometimes a better job.

So many of the complaints I hear about TUIs just come down to bad design. Even one input and textual responses require thoughtful design.

That's design as in function, not color palette. Although... that too.

[DrScientist]

OK - so in the case of text interface to a constrained tool, you are effectively mapping free text down to some underlying set of function calls and parameters, and you could ask the tools to describe those.

For more general AI tools, I guess it becomes harder to give a succinct description - and so that's still a bit trial and error ( even if you have good feedback ).