Comment by Philip-J-Fry
6 days ago
I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at.
Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool.
Edit: yes it's wrapping Claude. It's BREAKING the TUI. Not sure what people aren't getting here...
Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on.
The problem with being such a naysayer is that you're entirely disconnected from what's going on. You haven't tried an agent like Claude Code and experienced it for yourself, so you don't recognise what it looks like when it's in front of you.
There are two possibilities here:
1) This tool breaks the Claude TUI. Exactly as described by the comment.
2) The Claude TUI itself is broken. The comment is wrong, but assuming the "billion dollar TUI product" is capable of basic rendering and it's the wrapper that broke it, that is an entirely reasonable assumption
The fun here is that both of these softwares were made extensively using AI. No matter which of our options is the case here, the point stands. An AI-built product was shown, it looks obviously ass.
The issue is likely that the tmux session being generated is for some reason not propagating all term caps. Most likely it's an interop issue between tmux and docker and the image running under docker - possibly even something with the terminal client that the pipeline doesn't like somewhere.
Claude Code correctly reduces its display to 7-bit ASCII in response (still functional, although less pretty). Once I get around to fixing this, it will probably result in another section in https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/docs/dev/backe...
Edit: Looks like it's the terminal. That's a rabbit hole for another day.
Running through VS Code's terminal via VSCode tunnel, it looks like it normally does.
https://freeimage.host/i/BySkkDN
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I mean this is also true. You forgot the third option, that 1 and 2 are true (and 4th, that neither are).
Seriously, the Claude TUI fucking sucks. I don't know how anyone thinks otherwise. It breaks constantly if you enter your editor (<C-g>), or resizing windows/panes, or making another pane full screen, scrolling, or any number of things. It is objectively a bad piece of software.
And honestly, are we surprised? Anthropic says themselves that a lot of code is written by Claude. They've been saying that for years. If you look at agents now and think "man, agents a few years ago sucked" then this shouldn't be surprising at all! I mean FFS the thing spits out text and they designed it like a fucking game engine. It is silly
I have tried Claude code. It doesn't look like that!
I don't know what the project is. All I see is a TUI that looks completely broken.
Go and use Claude Code right now. Does it look like that? Random underscores all over the page. No it doesn't.
It can look like that in certain conditions. The question is why are you so eager to give critique on unrelated work, appearing in a demo screencap, to someone who didn't produce it?
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> Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on.
That's like blaming the company making hammers because you're unable to build a lasting house with the hammer, it really isn't up to Anthropic, but all about how you use the tool you're holding.
Do they also hold their hammer wrong when their TUI flickers for months?
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This analogy was trotted out every time someone complained about PHP. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.
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They’re talking past each other. For some, “high quality” is a comment about implementation elegance. For others, “high quality” is about duct-taping crude implementations together to fashion a kickass user experience. To most, quality probably involves some convex combination of these.
I have used those tools, I don't think they're THAT good tbh :P
I use claude every single day at work. I've burned hundreds of dollars a week in tokens. But I still think you're being too defensive while attacking Philip.
I'm sorry, but you need to look yourself in the mirror. You didn't like what they said so you jumped to the assumption that they must not have used CC (or any other agent). That if they had, they would have the same experience as you did/do. But this whole thread is exactly that conversation, that those experiences aren't shared. That this assumption is baseless. And you know what? That's okay. We're not robots. We're human. Each of us has our own unique world we live in. It's okay that people don't have the same experience as you. It's okay that their favorite color, food, activity, or whatever isn't the same as yours. I'm glad that we live in that kind of world. That's what makes things like culture. I don't want to live in a hive mind, and I don't think anyone else does either.
That is the same fight the 2D animators were having with 3D aninmation 30 years ago. The resolution is likely to be the same: the tool wins but the fundamentals stay, and the line between competent and incompetent practitioners moves but does not disappear.
Honestly, I think this is where the big divide is. People have massively different opinions on what "quality" is. Which is okay, but it feels like everyone is working under some assumption that quality is this very clear objective measure that we all agree on. Clearly we don't. We didn't before AI and well... if you can't tell that we don't with AI... you need to take a step back.
FWIW, I agree with Philip here. I don't think this screams "high quality" to me. I'm also not trying to take a shit on your project. Nothing screams "terrible" to me, but yeah, it does look a bit sloppy. There's no polish to it. It looks like someone that grades on "it works" and that's fine. But it also isn't everyone's cup of tea. Where the sloppiness comes in is like what Philip said. First thing I saw was the gif and well... I think Claude Code is sloppy. But this is also a great example at how and where LLMs visibly fail. Creating a box in text is pretty simple. There's tons of tools to do it. And the LLM 100% knows about characters like ⌜⌝⌞⌟⎜, it just doesn't use them and doesn't care. The code itself also looks very LLM generated.
It's fine and I don't think you have any reason to be ashamed of it, but I also wouldn't go around boasting that it is an example of high quality work too. And FWIW, I can't think of a single heavily LLM assisted code where I don't have similar feelings. I've seen stuff with more polish, but yeah, they feel off.
This is a space I feel weird in. I love the terminal. I love that there's a lot of new TUIs. But it also feels very weird because it is extremely clear that a lot of these new TUIs were written by people (or machines) that don't really have a lot of experience in the terminal itself. There's a real shared language by people like me who live in the cli. There's a reason people like me can pick up a new tool and guess certain flags and certain ways to use them. It's because of a shared design language that we know of and we end up writing that way because we know it reduces to cognitive load on our peers. But the LLMs? They don't have that shared experience.
I think this is true for a lot of stuff, not just TUIs or bash tools. Things just smell... off...
You do realize that you're complaining about the Claude Code TUI, right?
That's not what this product is; merely a tool it uses.
You claim "very high quality" but can't even get the basic UI working properly. You wrap tmux and a container in 2k lines of code and claim quality, I think the comment above was aimed at this claim.
The UI is working properly. Interfering with Anthropic's UI, or any of the other agent harness' UIs it supports, would be madness incarnate.
I also strongly suspect that you'd only taken a cursory glance at the top of the readme prior to passing judgment.
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So why has your tool completely broken the Claude Code UI then?
Can't you see in the gif? It's completely broken. My Claude doesn't look like that. Neither does anyone else's.
Claude Code will automatically "dumb" the TUI down a bit when it can't properly detect certain terminal capabilities, to avoid potential font rendering issues.
Likely there are some terminal caps that aren't being properly preserved inside of the sandbox. It's never bothered me since the agent itself works fine.
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I think at this point there is no convincing people. Clearly there is value in these tools and it generates code when steered properly. Perhaps your struggles are down to a skill issue.