You find this everywhere in the tech community. Especially places like github. Posts about software where there is no explanation whatsoever as to what it does or why.

It's impossible to explain everything from the beginning. You might not be the target audience and the software/blog post was unwittingly posted. And sometimes, people just put things on the web for shits and giggles with no audience in mind. With no audience in mind, you don't feel the need to explain anything.

Anyway, HN fulfills that need. HN is widely-read that it's likely SOMEONE knows what the hell something is, and if often willing to give a summary. So if you're befuddled, just read the comments.

I think that's because the authors are clairvoyant and naively expect us poor souls to be, too.

It is not clear to me - can I seamlessly compile the same codebase to a TUI and web or does it require web-first design?

I think it requires TUI-first design. Then it should seamlessly compile for web.

I think you're right. The library at the center of this is ratatui - a TUI library for Rust. The web translation layer is new.

Can you write in JavaScript or does it have to be rust?

The primary goal is to serve apps that use https://ratatui.rs to web. You can still bundle Javascript via Trunk though.