If we make a distinction between CLI apps and TUI apps, my interpretation is that the article was specifically talking about the latter.
By a CLI app (with the emphasis on command line) I mean something like grep, sort, cp, git, ls, tar, etc. The normal way of interacting with these is by writing commands on the shell, which means that if you know how to use it normally, you can also use it in a script. Which means that you can combine these into pipelines.
By a TUI app I mean (and I think the article means) something like Vim, Emacs, Tmux, Lynx, Tig, Midnight Commander, Claude Code, etc. - an interactive app that takes over your terminal while you're using it. You're not going to compose those into a pipeline. Or to be more precise, you're not going to use them in pipeline by using them the way you normally use them. If you can use them, it's probably because the app decided to provide a command-line interface in addition to the TUI.
Prompts like this feel like it's using the wrong abstraction. The "obvious" thing to do with something like this would be to generate some code that generates the image and then run that code.
Exactly - it very likely was trained on it. I tried this with Opus 4.6. I turned off web searches and other tool calls, and asked it to list some filenames it remembers being in the 7-zip repo. It got dozens exactly right and only two incorrect (they were close but not exact matches). I then asked it to give me the source code of a function I picked randomly, and it got the signature spot on, but not the contents.
My understanding of cleanroom is that the person/team programming is supposed to have never seen any of the original code. The agent is more like someone who has read the original code line by line, but doesn't remember all the details - and isn't allowed to check.
By a CLI app (with the emphasis on command line) I mean something like grep, sort, cp, git, ls, tar, etc. The normal way of interacting with these is by writing commands on the shell, which means that if you know how to use it normally, you can also use it in a script. Which means that you can combine these into pipelines.
By a TUI app I mean (and I think the article means) something like Vim, Emacs, Tmux, Lynx, Tig, Midnight Commander, Claude Code, etc. - an interactive app that takes over your terminal while you're using it. You're not going to compose those into a pipeline. Or to be more precise, you're not going to use them in pipeline by using them the way you normally use them. If you can use them, it's probably because the app decided to provide a command-line interface in addition to the TUI.