Comment by harrisi
8 days ago
Maybe I'm taking crazy pills, but I swore there have been very similar comments I've seen as the current top post by weakfish:
> Maybe I’m taking crazy pills, but I’m still stuck on “why the hell does a TUI need to run in terminal React by way of JavaScript”
> The fact that Anthropic felt the need to buy a runtime so they could make their TUI better speaks more to the quality of engineering than anything else IMO.
> If rewrites are so easy, why not rewrite CC in a native language? Would’ve been a hell of a lot cheaper.
It turns out, there's some similar sentiments in the last year ish:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124596
I'm not a fan of any of the technologies, companies, or people related to this. I just couldn't shake the feeling that I've seen similar comments.
September and all.
Maybe because the 1st thing any experienced technical person would think about? It's like rebuilding and optimizing the racing track to make F1 run faster.
I have ~24 years of experience coding and the LAST thing I think about when opening claude code is "why is this written in react".
Tell you what I sometimes think about though: The fact it has clickable links and complex formatting rules for markdown, the most interactive and highest-quality clickable interface I've ever seen in a terminal, and somehow manages to work. That actually blows my mind.
THEN, I'm reminded that it's written in React, and I think "Huh, guess that does make it a ton easier than using ncurses or something."
And done.
You’ve been writing code for 24 years and you don’t know that clickable links are a terminal emulator feature and not a Claude Code feature? Or that “markdown formatting” is just ansi escape codes, and possible with things other than React that don’t bring so many downsides?
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Okay and as someone who would rather just straight up use cursor than claude code, I'd rather have my software not crash out on me every 5 minutes. What sort of self respecting dev purposely uses broken software? Even opencode (use it on nonwork computers) is fully better at this point.
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Perhaps. The thing I was trying to highlight more is comments (particularly disapproving ones) about the intersection of JavaScript (especially React, apparently), TUIs, and LLMs.
I just thought it was interesting. I'm a fan of TUIs, both positive and negative about JavaScript (the modern language is quite nice, given you avoid the historical warts, in my opinion - the ecosystem is unfortunate), and I think the best description for how I feel about LLMs is that I'm bearish. Also Simon is a fantastically prolific and intelligent person though, even though LLMs are not my cup of tea.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960912 is a recent comment by someone I also respect related to how LLMs recreate human-like content (Widgets, really), making actual human-created content feel fake.
Sometimes it sure does feel like ELIZA is the main news source these days.
It's because rewrites are almost always a bad decision. Best case, it's a naive decision made by people who don't know better, worst case it kills the product (who here uses netscape?).
So, from the start, people will be skeptical of a "we rewrote xyz in Rust" because it rarely works out. But there's a lot more to this, in fact it's a little bit loaded with "tech bro" ideas:
- Rewriting in Rust
- Rewriting using AI
- Making terminal apps in JS
- Zig (a lot of people's dear language) is involved somehow
This attracts every single skeptical developer. The only thing missing is maybe blockchain, if that was still cool. It just hits all the "what? why?" spots.
I was already writing a comment, when I realized that what I wanted to write had already been said by the top comment. I suppose that's why comments read so similarly.
I don't want to edit this to change the narrative, but I wanted to clarify that I'm not not a fan of all of the technologies or people related to this. As far as compan{y,ies} go, though, well..
What's the implication or inference based upon this? So you're seeing comments sharing a general attitude. And?
As it is now, your post is meaningless to me.