I am a DBA fledgling with a lot of experience in programming.

I have developed several CLI, non interactive apps that solve some daily repetitive tasks or eliminate the human error from more complex albeit not so daily tasks. These tools are now part of our tool box.

I find CLI apps are great because you can include them in an automated workflow.

Also the Unix philosophy of doing a single thing but doing it well, and letting the output of a process be the input of another, is a great way of building a set of tools than would consolidate into an strategic advantage.

My boss recently commented that developing CLI tools is "backwards", or constitutes a "regression".

I told him I disagreed, because most CLI tools that exist now are not legacy but are live projects with improved versions being released all the time.

Is this kind of development considered "backwards" in the market?

Does it look bad on a rèsumè?

I also considered all solutions whether they are web or desktop, should have command line, non-interactive options. Some people consider this a waste of programming resources.

Is this goal a worthy one in a software project?