Am I the only one who prefers CLI over a flashy web UI for critical changes?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, especially as we’ve been evaluating some of the newer next-gen firewall platforms at work. It seems like every vendor presentation is a whirlwind of glossy dashboards, animated topology maps, and one-click policy wizards. Don’t get me wrong—for monitoring and high-level overviews, a well-designed web UI can be fantastic. But when it comes time to make a critical change—like pushing a new ruleset, troubleshooting a complex NAT, or modifying a VPN phase-2 proposal—I find myself, without fail, SSHing into the CLI.

There’s just a level of precision and clarity there that a graphical interface often obscures. In a CLI, I can see the exact syntax, the hierarchy is laid out in the command structure itself, and I can script or copy-paste configurations with confidence. I know exactly what I’m committing. With a web UI, I’m often clicking through nested menus, and there’s this underlying anxiety: “Is this one checkbox actually applying the five separate settings I think it is?” or “Did that policy truly attach to the correct zone, or is there some visual grouping on the backend I’m missing?”

Maybe it’s my background, or maybe it’s the scars from past migrations where UI-based configs didn’t import cleanly. The CLI feels like the source of truth. It’s also incredibly valuable for documentation—you can just paste the relevant `show` or `get` commands and their output right into a change ticket. No screenshots needed.

I’m curious how others in the trenches feel. Is this a generational thing, or a preference born from specific types of complex environments? In our B2B space, where we manage firewalls for dozens of clients, reproducibility and audit trails are paramount. Does anyone else feel that flashy UIs, while great for sales demos, can sometimes introduce a layer of abstraction that’s counterproductive for deep, critical work? Or perhaps you’ve had the opposite experience—where a modern UI has genuinely made complex rule design safer and faster?

Let’s discuss the pros and cons, and any war stories you might have. I’m particularly interested in how this plays into high-availability scenarios and large-scale rollouts.

— Alex