I think they were saying that in "cup" screen mode (CUP: CUrsor Position, activated with smcup termcap), when you exit (rmcup) the text is lost, as well as the history since it was managed by the application, not the terminal.

Their hypothesis was that maybe there was aj intention to have claude code fill the terminal history. And using potentially harzardous cursor manipulation.

In other words, readline vs ncurse.

I don't see python and ipython readline struggling as bad tho...