Comment by dboon
9 hours ago
It’s surprising to hear this get chalked up to “it’s the way our TUI library works”, while e.g. opencode is going to the lowest level and writing their own TUI backend. I get that we can’t expect everyone to reinvent the wheel, but it feels symptomatic of something that folks are willing to chalk up their issues as just being an unfortunate and unavoidable symptom of a library they use rather than seeming that unacceptable and going to the lowest level.
CC is one of the best and most innovative pieces of software of the last decade. Anthropic has so much money. No judgment, just curious, do you have someone who’s an expert on terminal rendering on the team? If not, why? If so, why choose a buggy / poorly designed TUI library — or why not fix it upstream?
We started by using Ink, and at this point it’s our own framework due to the number of changes we’ve made to it over the months. Terminal rendering is hard, and it’s less that we haven’t modified the renderer, and more that there is this pretty fundamental tradeoff with terminal rendering that we have been navigating.
Other terminal apps make different tradeoffs: for example Vim virtualizes scrolling, which has tradeoffs like the scroll physics feeling non-native and lines getting fully clipped. Other apps do what Claude Code does but don’t re-render scrollback, which avoids flickering but means the UI is often garbled if you scroll up.
As someone who's used Claude Code daily since the day it was released, the sentiment back then (sooo many months ago) was that the Agent CI coding TUIs were kind of experimental proof-of-concepts. We have seen them be incredibly effective and the CC team has continued to add features.
Tech debt isn't something that even experienced large teams are immune to. I'm not a huge TypeScript fan, so seeing their choice to run their app on Node to me felt like a trade-off between development speed with the experience that the team had and at the expense of long-term growth and performance. I regularly experience pretty intense flickering and rendering issues and high CPU usage and even crashes but that doesn't stop me from finding the product incredibly useful.
Developing good software especially in a format that is relatively revolutionary takes time to get right and I'm sure whatever efforts they have internally to push forward a refactor will be worth it. But, just like in any software development, refactors are prone to timeline slips and scope creep. A company having tons of money doesn't change the nature of problem-solving in software development.
> CC is one of the best and most innovative pieces of software of the last decade...
Oh come on! Aider existed before it, and so did many other TUI AI agents. I'd say Rust and Elixir were more innovation than CC.