Comment by prodigycorp
9 hours ago
I have not used Claude Code in a couple months. THEY HAVEN’T FIXED THIS YET?
I’m starting to think that the reason why anthropic doesn’t open source Claude code isn’t due to competitive reasons, it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is.
Maybe they bought Bun to increase the rate of flickering so that the text looks solid again
The problem is they are using the Ink library which clears and redraws for each update.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769
I locally patched the closed-source CLI npm package but it's not perfect. They would have to switch how their TUI is rendered on their side.
Apparently OpenAI Codex is rust+ratatui which does not have this issue.
I'm always surprised that Python doesn't have as good TUI libraries as Javascript or Rust. With the amount of CLI tooling written in Python, you'd think it had better libraries than any other language.
Blessed was a decent one iirc:
https://github.com/jquast/blessed
One reason for the lack of python might be the timing of the TUI renaissance, which I think happened (is happening?) alongside the rise of languages like Go and Rust.
it has, but python being single threaded (until recently) didn't make it an attractive choice for CLI tools.
example: `ranger` is written in python and it's freaking slow. in comparison, `yazi` (Rust) has been a breeze.
Edit: Sorry, I meant GIL, not single thread.
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Textual looks really nice, but I usually make web apps so I haven’t tried it for anything serious:
https://textual.textualize.io/
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They started with Ink but have since switched to their own renderer:
> We originally built Claude Code on Ink, a React renderer for the terminal. [...] Over the past few months, we've rewritten our rendering system from scratch (while still using React).
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769#issueco...
Thanks for sharing. Very … interesting. Just trying to understand why the heck would React be the best tool here?
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React?!
Good grief get me off this sloppy ride.
then maybe they should've bought and fixed Ink instead of bun, just saying!
FWIW, Ink is working on an incremental rendering system: they have a flag to enable it. It's currently pretty buggy though unfortunately. Definitely wish Anthropic would commit some resources back to the project they're built on to help fix it...
I have a hypothesis: they haven't fixed this because they're using Claude Code to develop Claude Code. I'm a fan of Claude Code, but it isn't good enough to fix tricky issues like this. And because no one looks at the codebase themselves, they haven't been able to fix it after many months. Sometimes, all we need is an engineer to sit down for the weekend and fix the damn bug, not spin up 9 different Claude Agents prompted to fix itself.
I think its clear the team is drowning. They are just trying to keep their head above water. They have massive adoption, high churn in the underlying models, and unlimited numbers of github issues opened every day.
Should it be solved by now? Yes. If anyone on the team is dogfooding it in a typical tmux environment, its painful. But lets give them some leeway here.
This is a massive commercial product with a serious issue (everyone knows about the flickering) that hasn't been solved for months now. I don't think leeway is warranted.
Their GitHub issue tracker is very busy: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/pulse
To your point, I’d say the dev team deserves some leeway, but the employer (Anthropic) is raking in the $$$ and doesn’t deserve any sympathy for underfunding the CC team.
Nobody is blaming the individual engineers here. The team as a whole can take the blame.
their web chat and app are also filled with bugs
> it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is.
if Amodei hadn't said "90% of code will be written by AI", at least I wouldn't call them hypocrites, but the fact that the company that makes such wild claims can't fix a freaking flicker and scroll issue until an indie-dev steps in just shows how far behind their product is from their claims.
I have CC and use many models with it (Codex in CC, try it!), but I won't let Anthropic "lecture" us about how "the roots of the problem go deep". Literally no other CLI tool has these issues: opencode, codex, gemini, droid, etc.
I observe flickering with gemini-cli every now and then.
and it messes with tmux status bar for some reason.
The joke is that AGI will be achieved when Claude Code can fix the flickering in Claude Code.
Imagine the amount of slop PRs if it was open source. They don’t want to taste their own medicine
Reading their GitHub issues already is like reading through the diary entries of spurned lovers. I can only imagine the PRs.
I wouldn't be able to ship this to anyone without fixing it. Sending 5,000 lines of text to a terminal just to clear them all immediately, and in a loop... i'd be so embarrassed. Apps that clear scrollback have their uses, but you don't spam the terminal with unusable garbage.
And we solved this problem over 30 years ago? Ncurses was made for this. The buffer is kept in memory, you hit page-up and it renders the previous page, page-down and it renders the next page, let it roll and it renders each successive page as a stream, or just the last page, etc.
The biggest strength in OpenAI’s codex vs claude code is that it’s written in Rust and smooth as butter
except when it needs to do tasks then it's the slowest of them all
same, also it uses like 800M of ram... like why?