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.

Josh HamiltonMar 4, 20264 min read

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Josh Hamilton. “Building hackernews-tui in 30 minutes with OpenTUI and GPT-5.3-Codex” (2026-03-04). https://nearbycoder.com/articles/building-hackernews-tui-in-30-minutes-with-opentui-and-gpt-5-3-codex/

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Building hackernews-tui in 30 minutes with OpenTUI and GPT-5.3-Codex · Josh Hamilton · 2026-03-04
https://nearbycoder.com/articles/building-hackernews-tui-in-30-minutes-with-opentui-and-gpt-5-3-codex/

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

npx hackernews-tui

What shipped

Open source repo: nearbycoder/hackernews-tui
npm package: hackernews-tui
Project page: hackernews-tui
Layoff log: Week 3: hackernews-tui

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build-in-public tui opentui npm hacker-news ai-coding

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