I have not used Claude Code in a couple months. THEY HAVEN’T FIXED THIS YET?
I’m starting to think that the reason why anthropic doesn’t open source Claude code isn’t due to competitive reasons, it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is.
Maybe they bought Bun to increase the rate of flickering so that the text looks solid again
I'm always surprised that Python doesn't have as good TUI libraries as Javascript or Rust. With the amount of CLI tooling written in Python, you'd think it had better libraries than any other language.
One reason for the lack of python might be the timing of the TUI renaissance, which I think happened (is happening?) alongside the rise of languages like Go and Rust.
They also probably mean TUIs, as CLIs don't do the whole "Draw every X" thing (and usually aren't interactive), that's basically what sets them apart from CLIs.
It’s surprising how quickly the bottleneck starts to become python itself in any nontrivial application, unless you’re very careful to write a thin layer that mostly shells out to C modules.
Textual is A++. Feels a bit less snappy than Ink, but it makes up in all things with its immense feature-set. Seriously fun building apps of all kinds with this lib.
They started with Ink but have since switched to their own renderer:
> We originally built Claude Code on Ink, a React renderer for the terminal. [...] Over the past few months, we've rewritten our rendering system from scratch (while still using React).
React is just an abstraction of a State -> View function.
While not universally applicable, it's very convenient during development to focus on State without thinking about View, or focus on View without thinking about State.
The concept itself has nothing to do with the actual renderer: HTML, TUI, or whatever. You can render your state to a text file if you want to.
So the flickering is caused either by a faulty renderer, or by using a render target (terminal) that is incompatible with the UI behavior (frequent partial re-renders, outputting a lot of text etc.)
Thats the problem. Some developers want to avoid learning another programming language and use one for everything (including their technologies.)
Using TS, React here doesn’t make sense for stability in the long term. As you can see, even when they replaced Ink and built their own, the problem still exists.
There are other alternatives that are better than whatever Anthropic did such as Bubbletea (Go) or Ratatui (Rust) which both are better suited for this.
Maybe they were thinking more about job security with TypeScript over technical correctness and a robust implementation architecture and this shows the lack of it.
I’m a fan of Bubbletea, but it is significantly less ergonomic than React. Although I’d argue that if that starts to matter significantly, your TUI is probably too cluttered anyway and you should pare it down.
FWIW, Ink is working on an incremental rendering system: they have a flag to enable it. It's currently pretty buggy though unfortunately. Definitely wish Anthropic would commit some resources back to the project they're built on to help fix it...
I have a hypothesis: they haven't fixed this because they're using Claude Code to develop Claude Code. I'm a fan of Claude Code, but it isn't good enough to fix tricky issues like this. And because no one looks at the codebase themselves, they haven't been able to fix it after many months. Sometimes, all we need is an engineer to sit down for the weekend and fix the damn bug, not spin up 9 different Claude Agents prompted to fix itself.
Perhaps the engineer could sit down for 8 hours a day during the work week. The Silicon Valley obsession with having no life and working weekends is so endemic.
> it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is.
if Amodei hadn't said "90% of code will be written by AI", at least I wouldn't call them hypocrites, but the fact that the company that makes such wild claims can't fix a freaking flicker and scroll issue until an indie-dev steps in just shows how far behind their product is from their claims.
I have CC and use many models with it (Codex in CC, try it!), but I won't let Anthropic "lecture" us about how "the roots of the problem go deep". Literally no other CLI tool has these issues: opencode, codex, gemini, droid, etc.
I think its clear the team is drowning. They are just trying to keep their head above water. They have massive adoption, high churn in the underlying models, and unlimited numbers of github issues opened every day.
Should it be solved by now? Yes. If anyone on the team is dogfooding it in a typical tmux environment, its painful. But lets give them some leeway here.
This is a massive commercial product with a serious issue (everyone knows about the flickering) that hasn't been solved for months now. I don't think leeway is warranted.
To your point, I’d say the dev team deserves some leeway, but the employer (Anthropic) is raking in the $$$ and doesn’t deserve any sympathy for underfunding the CC team.
Funding doesn’t _necessarily_ mean hiring more devs.
To your point about hiring 1000 devs not solving anything: I agree. For a project of this scope, you’re probably going to peak at one or two 3 person teams with at least one principal dev per team with deep experience in the tech stack and in architecting/building TUIs in general. I would hope their devs are making a relatively lucrative salary too, to attract talent.
I have no idea what the internal structure is so this is just pure speculation: judging by the backlog of issues on their GH, they could use better community management and developer relations. I suspect they’re riding on the existing hype/community interest to fulfill these functions but that only provides a piece of the puzzle.
> For a project of this scope, you’re probably going to peak at one or two 3 person teams with at least one principal dev per team
I think thats probably 1 team short, but I agree on the order of magnitude. So if we assume 12 devs, how long do we think its going to take to fix 5k github issues lol?
Again, I 100% agree the flicker bug should be at the top of the list. And I agree their products in general are riddled with bugs. But Im just saying I can understand the situation even if I think this specific bug should have been fixed already if they were regularly using a setup that runs into it (which I have to assume they arent).
I wouldn't be able to ship this to anyone without fixing it. Sending 5,000 lines of text to a terminal just to clear them all immediately, and in a loop... i'd be so embarrassed. Apps that clear scrollback have their uses, but you don't spam the terminal with unusable garbage.
And we solved this problem over 30 years ago? Ncurses was made for this. The buffer is kept in memory, you hit page-up and it renders the previous page, page-down and it renders the next page, let it roll and it renders each successive page as a stream, or just the last page, etc.
Many users do like to use scrollback to copy large passages of text, which becomes difficult and cumbersome if they have to use page-up page-down to get at the other parts of it.
I’m starting to think that the reason why anthropic doesn’t open source Claude code isn’t due to competitive reasons, it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is.
Maybe they bought Bun to increase the rate of flickering so that the text looks solid again