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Nearbycoder

Josh Hamilton
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Building hackernews-tui in 30 minutes with OpenTUI and GPT-5.3-Codex

I built and shipped a Hacker News terminal UI in about 30 minutes using OpenTUI and GPT-5.3-Codex, then published it straight to npm from the Codex app.

2026-03-04 4 min read

I wanted a faster way to scan Hacker News without opening a browser, so I built hackernews-tui as a small command-line app.

hackernews-tui screenshot

The interesting part is speed: this went from idea to shipped npm package in roughly 30 minutes.

Why this was so fast

OpenTUI handled the terminal UI primitives, so I did not have to spend time wiring low-level terminal behavior from scratch.

GPT-5.3-Codex handled most of the implementation loop:

  • scaffold the project and command structure
  • generate core search and rendering flow
  • iterate on UX quickly in terminal
  • clean up packaging and publish workflow

The Codex app made it straightforward to move from prompt to working code to publish without context-switching across multiple tools.

Run it

bunx hackernews-tui

or

npx hackernews-tui

What shipped