Comment by inigyou
13 hours ago
They vibecoded it, and admitted as much. Once it was able to self-vibecode, that's all they did. That's why it's written in React and uses gigabytes of RAM as a chat client.
13 hours ago
They vibecoded it, and admitted as much. Once it was able to self-vibecode, that's all they did. That's why it's written in React and uses gigabytes of RAM as a chat client.
Not only did they decide to write a terminal application in React, but it's 500K lines of code. It's strange because I'm sure Claude is capable of writing a decent TUI in C. It says a lot about the engineering culture at Anthropic, at least on the software side.
Oh, a nice subthread place to vent. Their CLI is so f tragic that it is ridiculous. It keeps scrambling the terminal, scroll and basic shortcuts keep breaking, I've used so many tuis and terminal apps and many of them are a single man operation and a side project and I have never seen anything so bad.
If I didn't know from experience that directed properly claude can be powerful, knowing that they used it to create that CLI would be instant runaway based on very reasonable heuristics - if they are not able to use their product to create a decent piece of software that is not even sophisticated then it seems futile for me to try.
I just do not understand. I feel like most HN could vibe code better claude CLI in claude than the CLI (and certainly just write one) than what we have to deal with to use subscription.
I could not agree more that Claude itself is a janky, hacky, crappy piece of software.
When management at $DAYJOB brought the hammer down and said, "Everyone has to use genAI all the time, OR ELSE," I expected to be blown away by the tool I was avoiding due to ethical concerns, aesthetic objections, humanism, and long-term thinking.
I was born away, but not in a good way.
The CLI is _bad_. I've seen it randomly fail to render anything at all on the terminal multiple times. It has a vim-mode, but it's painfully buggy, and I can literally outrun it - if I try to type too quickly after hitting Esc for normal mode, it just doesn't return to normal mode. It's I was keeping track of the bugs in the Claude TUI, but gave up because it was taking _too much of my time_ to do so.
If nothing else, I'd say Claude shows convincingly that success is not the default for vibecoding.
Yes, it technically does the job, and no, I don't think I've ever used a worse TUI.
And it would also be a sales pitch, their AI is so great that can write C code without any kind of security flaws, the future of systems programming!
Had to make a decision for a TUI I'm working on and opted for curses rather than something like textual. If I wasn't using an LLM to do some of the plumbing I'd probably have used textual to avoid the inconvenience.
There's a lot of opportunity to leverage LLMs to make codebases less bloated and less reliant on complex but human user friendly dependencies that not many people seem to be taking advantage of.
This is about the desktop app, not the claude code TUI
You say that as if somehow the trend for cross platform desktop apps to be ridiculously bloated bundles of browser overlays is new?
What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri? Slack, Discord, VS Code, Teams, Notion...
Though one would hope that they could leverage their advanced models to create native software per platform that can perform better.
Claude Code is uniquely stupid in that it uses React to power a non-Electron terminal app.
You'd think Artificial Intelligence could be used to find a better path forward, alas.
Let me know when we have actual AI and we can get right on it.
Now I only need non-engineers to understand this difference in architecture and design decisions, and I will have a job.
The ChatGPT app on macOS is native. Same for the Gemini app.
> What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri?
Calibre, VLC, all the jetbrains suite, Sublime, Unity, Unreal, CodeBlocks, Adobe’s stuff,…