Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine".
For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then
-> layouts elements
-> rasterizes them to a 2d screen
-> diffs that against the previous screen
-> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw
We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written.
This is just the sort of bloated overcomplication I often see in first iteration AI generated solutions before I start pushing back to reduce the complexity.
Usually, after 4-5 iterations, you can get something that has shed 80-90% of the needless overcomplexification.
My personal guess is this is inherent in the way LLMs integrate knowledge during training. You always have a tradeoff in contextualization vs generalization.
So the initial response is often a plugged together hack from 5 different approaches, your pushbacks provide focus and constraints towards more inter-aligned solution approaches.
What? Technology has stopped making sense to me. Drawing a UI with React and rasterizing it to ANSI? Are we competing to see what the least appropriate use of React is? Are they really using React to draw a few boxes of text on screen?
There is more than meets the eye for sure. I recently compared a popular TUI library in Go (Bubble Tea) to the most popular Rust library (Ratatui). They use significantly different approaches for rendering. From what I can tell, neither is insane. I haven’t looked to see what Claude Code uses.
He doesn't: https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
For those who don't want to visit X:
This is just the sort of bloated overcomplication I often see in first iteration AI generated solutions before I start pushing back to reduce the complexity.
Usually, after 4-5 iterations, you can get something that has shed 80-90% of the needless overcomplexification.
My personal guess is this is inherent in the way LLMs integrate knowledge during training. You always have a tradeoff in contextualization vs generalization.
So the initial response is often a plugged together hack from 5 different approaches, your pushbacks provide focus and constraints towards more inter-aligned solution approaches.
Kudos to them for figuring out how to complicate what should have been simple.
Implementation details aside (React??), that sounds exactly like “just a TUI”…
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Interesting. On first glance that seems over engineered. I wonder what the reason is for doing it that way?
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How ridiculous is it that instead of a command line binary it's a terminal emulator, with react of all things!
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Don't link out to x, its trash
Depends on who you follow
What? Technology has stopped making sense to me. Drawing a UI with React and rasterizing it to ANSI? Are we competing to see what the least appropriate use of React is? Are they really using React to draw a few boxes of text on screen?
I'm just flabbergasted.
The further I scroll the more validated I feel for having the very same reaction.
There is more than meets the eye for sure. I recently compared a popular TUI library in Go (Bubble Tea) to the most popular Rust library (Ratatui). They use significantly different approaches for rendering. From what I can tell, neither is insane. I haven’t looked to see what Claude Code uses.
It's AI all the way down
But it's very subsidizes when compared to API tokens, so we are all being paid by VCs to write prompts actually.
Ah, the hell site, no click.
And that's why it's taking so much CPU and is a pain to use with tmux.