With extensibility via plugins, MCP (stdio and http), UI to prompt the user for choices and redirection, tools to manage and view context, and on and on.
It is not at all a small app, at least as far as UX surface area. There are, what, 40ish slash commands? Each one is an opportunity for bugs and feature gaps.
I would still call that small, maybe medium. emacs is huge as far as CLI tools go, awk is large because it implements its own language (apparently capable of writing Doom in). `top` probably has a similar number of interaction points, something like `lftp` might have more between local and remote state.
The complex and magic parts are around finding contextual things to include, and I'd be curious how many are that vs "forgot to call clear() in the TUI framework before redirecting to another page".
I said relatively simple. It is mostly an API interface with Anthropic models, with tool calling on top of it, very simple input and output.
With extensibility via plugins, MCP (stdio and http), UI to prompt the user for choices and redirection, tools to manage and view context, and on and on.
It is not at all a small app, at least as far as UX surface area. There are, what, 40ish slash commands? Each one is an opportunity for bugs and feature gaps.
I would still call that small, maybe medium. emacs is huge as far as CLI tools go, awk is large because it implements its own language (apparently capable of writing Doom in). `top` probably has a similar number of interaction points, something like `lftp` might have more between local and remote state.
The complex and magic parts are around finding contextual things to include, and I'd be curious how many are that vs "forgot to call clear() in the TUI framework before redirecting to another page".
I’m pretty certain you haven’t used it yet(to its fullest extent) then. Claude Code is easily one of the most complex terminal UIs I have seen yet.
Could you explain why? When I think about complex TUIs, I think about things we were building with Turbo Vision in the 90s.
1 reply →