Terminal Fear: The 15 Minutes That Could Change Your Workflow

A story has stuck with me for over thirty years.

During my Master’s at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, my supervisor’s colleague visited from the United States on sabbatical. He was a well-known researcher in the human factors field and was incredibly generous with his time, helping me through the final stages of my thesis. One afternoon we were talking about new technologies in research, and he told me a story about writing his own PhD.

At the time, theses were written on typewriters. During the revision process, when his supervisory committee recommended changes — sometimes significant, sometimes minor — the only option was to retype entire chapters. He spent weeks simply retyping pages for what amounted to small corrections. The whole process from first draft through revisions to submission took about six months, and a large portion of that time was pure mechanical retyping.

Partway through his write-up, his department acquired several word processors — the old dedicated machines, not software. Someone suggested he try one. He declined. He didn’t have time to learn a “complicated new technology” in the middle of his thesis.

A few days after he finally submitted, he wandered back into the department with some time on his hands and sat down at one of the word processors. Within fifteen to thirty minutes, the air turned blue. He was — let’s say — loudly and colourfully expressing his frustration, having realised that this “complicated technology” would have taken minutes to learn and saved him literal weeks, if not months, of work. He could have produced a better thesis in less time, if he’d just spent that same fifteen minutes at the start instead of at the end.

I think about this story every time I see someone recoil from a terminal. The terminal isn’t a new technology — it’s how humans have been interacting with computers since the early days of modern computing. What’s new is the generation of AI-powered command-line tools and coding assistants that thrive in it.

The Flinch

It happens constantly. I open a terminal — or an IDE like VS Code with a terminal in it — and start working, and the reaction from colleagues and students is immediate: That looks too complicated. I can’t do that. That’s for programmers.

It’s not that the terminal is actually difficult. It’s that it’s unfamiliar. They’ve spent years, sometimes decades, interacting with computers exclusively through graphical interfaces — clicking buttons, dragging windows, navigating menus. A blinking cursor on a dark background feels like being dropped into a foreign country without a phrasebook.

But here’s the thing: the terminal is just text. You type a command, you get a result. There’s no hidden complexity behind it — what you see is what’s happening. In many ways, it’s simpler than a GUI, not more complicated. There are no buried menus, no settings five clicks deep, no mysterious icons. You say what you want, and it does it.

Why This Matters Now More Than Ever

Here’s the part that makes terminal fear genuinely costly in 2026: AI assistants are text-native.

Large language models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot — are fundamentally text-in, text-out systems. They read text, they produce text. The command line is their natural habitat.

Yes, chatbots have nice web interfaces. Yes, coding assistants are getting better at interacting with GUIs. But let’s be honest — they’re still pretty terrible at it. GUI control is clunky, error-prone, and slow. When an AI assistant works through a terminal or a code editor, it’s fast, precise, and transparent. You can see exactly what it’s doing. You can copy, modify, and rerun commands. Everything is text, and text is what these models are best at.

If you avoid the terminal, you’re cutting yourself off from the most powerful way to interact with AI tools. You’re limited to whatever buttons and menus someone else designed for you, instead of being able to tell the computer — through an AI assistant — exactly what you want done.

It Takes Fifteen Minutes

The terminal inside VS Code is a good place to start. It’s right there — no separate application to find, no intimidating full-screen black window. Just a panel at the bottom of your editor. You can open it with a keystroke and close it when you’re done.

And here’s the thing people don’t realise: you can’t break your machine. You’re not going to accidentally delete your entire system or corrupt your files by typing a command. The terminal doesn’t do anything you don’t tell it to do, and the things you’ll be doing — navigating folders, running scripts, asking an AI assistant a question — are completely safe.

Here’s what you actually need to know to get started:

cd — move to a folder
ls (Mac) or dir (Windows) — see what’s in a folder
mkdir — create a new folder
python script.py — run a Python script

That’s four commands. You can learn them in five minutes.

But the real unlock is installing a CLI tool like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, or OpenAI Codex. These are AI assistants that live in your terminal. Once installed, you can ask them to search the web and summarise what they find, write a Python script to plot your data, draft an email, restructure a folder of files, or explain a concept — all from a single text prompt. No clicking through menus, no switching between apps. You describe what you want in plain English, and the assistant does it.

That’s the power of working in text. The terminal is where AI assistants are most capable, most transparent, and most useful. Everything else — the chatbot web interfaces, the GUI plugins — is a wrapper around this same text-based interaction, usually with less control and less visibility into what’s actually happening.

The Word Processor Lesson

The colleague from my Master’s years didn’t avoid the word processor because it was hard. He avoided it because it looked hard, and he assumed the learning curve would cost him time he didn’t have. The opposite was true. The fifteen minutes he eventually spent learning it would have saved him months. The lesson he learnt the hard way, and passed on to me: never be afraid to at least try something new — whether it’s an old technology that looks complicated but probably isn’t, or a new one that seems intimidating but might transform how you work.

The terminal is the same story, decades later. It looks intimidating because it’s unfamiliar, not because it’s difficult. And the cost of avoidance is growing — because the most powerful AI tools aren’t behind a button in a menu. They’re CLI tools that run in a terminal, reading and producing the text that large language models are built for.

You don’t need to become a command-line expert. You just need to get past the flinch. Open a terminal. Install an AI assistant. Ask it a question. See what happens.

It takes fifteen minutes. And you might find yourself wondering why you didn’t do it sooner.

Once you’re past the flinch, everything else opens up. I’ve written about how 95% of my work now happens in VS Code — a single environment where writing, coding, data analysis, and AI assistants all live side by side. I’ve also written about ditching PowerPoint entirely in favour of coding lecture slides in HTML with AI assistants. My students — with zero coding experience — are building presentation decks in 20-30 minutes using the HTML Slides Starter Kit. None of that is possible if you can’t get past a blinking cursor.

The terminal is the true window. Everything useful is on the other side.

Michael Richardson Professor, School of Psychological Sciences Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences Macquarie University

AI Disclosure: This article was written with the assistance of AI tools, including Claude. The ideas, opinions, experiences, and anecdote described are entirely my own — the AI helped with drafting, editing, and structuring the text. I use AI tools extensively and openly in my research, teaching, and writing, and I encourage others to do the same. Using AI well is a skill worth developing, not something to hide or be ashamed of.