Comment by elAhmo
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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".
Also it's highly multithreaded / multiprocess - you can run subagents that can communicate with each other, you can interrupt it while it's in the middle of thinking and it handles it gracefully without forgetting what it was doing
They wouldn't have 6000 issues if they hired one or two Rust engineers.
If I would get a dollar each time a developer (or CTO!) told me "this is (relatively) simple, it will take 2 days/weeks", but then it actually took 2 years+ to fully build and release a product that has more useful features than bugs...
I am not protecting anthropic[0], but how come in this forum every day I still see these "it's simple" takes from experienced people - I have no idea. There are who knows how many terminal emulators out there, with who knows how many different configurations. There are plugins for VSCode and various other editors (so it's not only TUI).
Looking at issue tracker ~1/3 of issues are seemingly feature requests[1].
Do not forget we are dealing with LLMs and it's a tool, which purpose and selling point that it codes on ANY computer in ANY language for ANY system. It's very popular tool run each day by who knows how many people - I could easily see, how such "relatively simple" tool would rack up thousands of issues, because "CC won't do weird thing X, for programming language Y, while I run from my terminal Z". And because it's LLM - theres whole can of non deterministic worms.
Have you created an LLM agent, especially with moderately complex tool usage? If yes and it worked flawlessly - tell your secrets (and get hired by Anthropic/ChatGPT/etc). Probably 80% of my evergrowing code was trying to just deal with unknown unknowns - what if LLM invokes tool wrong? How to guide LLM back on track? How to protect ourselves and keep LLM on track if prompts are getting out of hand or user tries to do something weird? The problems were endless...
Yes the core is "simple", but it's extremely deep can of worms, for such successful tool - I easily could see how there are many issues.
Also super funny, that first issue for me at the moment is how user cannot paste images when it has Korean language input (also issue description is in Korean) and second issue is about input problems in Windows Powershell and CMD, which is obviously total different world compared to POSIX (???) terminal emulators.
[0] I have very adverse feelings for mega ultra wealthy VC moneys...
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=is%3Aissu...
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.
It’s extremely simple.
If that’s the most complex TUI (yeah, new acronym) you’ve seen, you have a lot to catch up on!
I am talking rendering image/video in the terminal!
Could you explain why? When I think about complex TUIs, I think about things we were building with Turbo Vision in the 90s.
I’m going to buck the trend and say it’s really not that complex. AFAIK they are using Ink, which is React with a TUI renderer.
Cue I could build it in a weekend vibes, I built my own agent TUI using the OpenAI agent SDK and Ink. Of course it’s not as fleshed out as Claude, but it supports git work trees for multi agent, slash commands, human in the loop prompts and etc. If I point it at the Anthropic models it more or less produces results as m good as the real Claude TUI.
I actually “decompiled” the Claude tools and prompts and recreated them. As of 6 months ago Claude was 15 tools, mostly pretty basic (list for, read file, wrote file, bash, etc) with some very clever prompts, especially the task tool it uses to do the quasi planning mode task bullets (even when not in planning mode).
Honestly the idea of bringing this all together with an affordable monthly service and obviously some seriously creative “prompt engineers” is the magic/hard part (and making the model itself, obviously).