> For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then

> -> layouts elements

> -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen

> -> diffs that against the previous screen

> -> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw

Yup. Overengineering.

As someone who maintains a roguelike with a terminal-like UI that:

1. Maintains an internal representation of what the game thinks is on screen.

2. Runs the game for one frame which updates that representation.

3. Generates a diff to see how that differs from what's actually on screen.

4. Executes the minimum set of draw calls to get the screen to match the internal representation.

It's really not that hard. It's a few hundred lines of code.

I hadn't seen that quote before, what an embarrassing thing to go on the internet and write...

Why the hell does it need to be so complex? People have been making TUIs for decades. Did we need a small game engine to run claude code?

~ "it's not a TUI! <describes an outrageously overengineered TUI> and my dad works at Nintendo"

curses, bud. curses.

It's genuinely difficult to tell how much of this is true. The post is obviously 100% posturing, but some of the words describe things that could be done.

Very few game engines do anything I'd describe as rasterisation. That's kind of the point of a GPU. Well, it used to be. I suppose "small game engines" might be more likely on average to include a rasteriser. The typical reason for this is because the author wanted to write it. Whereas big engine make triangle give hardware go brrr.

So I assume here 'rasterize' means 'printf'. And diffing screens means diffing 50..150 lines of text. And "generating ANSI sequences to draw" means 'printf' with some ANSI sequences interpolated in.

Then there's the frame budget. You have to understand they are operating within a strict frame budget -- they're not messing around, OK. They have a 16 ms frame budget, so they burned 11 ms and now have a (roughly) ~5 ms approx. budget for the final 'printf' in the chain???

> For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then -> layouts elements -> rasterizes them to a 2d screen -> diffs that against the previous screen -> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw

That’s rather sickening.

> https://fxtwitter.com

What is this?

when they announced /pet mode or whatever - that was really the end of the line for me.

this allows for comfortable ergonomics IMO

not that it could be leaner for sure but i get the reasoning behind the tui rendering layer

Somebody read/watched too much Casey Muratori.

Well it runs on something they didn't design (Electron) using GUI library they didn't design (React)

For company with that much AI you'd think if it was actually good, doing that part in fast and performant way would be "easy"

And yet, nobody that writes game engines would do it this way because game engines need to be efficient..

If they used an actual game engine to render a 3D UI from scratch it would be more efficient

I loved Turbo Pascal....

> why are you comparing Claude Code to your editor?

Because the editor does more. All the compute-intensive parts of the agent are in the cloud. Zero reason for an agent harness to require anything beyond a potato to run.

Do you work for Anthropic or something?

You seem weirdly invested in defending bad decisions.

Even if you're and AI booster, shouldn't you want a better UI?

They're a multi billion dollar company. Surely they can dedicate a small amount of their resources to improving UX?

You mean on some days it goes faster and some other days slower?

That is by design. It depends on how much other people are using their services right now and they do communicate it somewhere in the TOS that they do this. Otherwise they could give us a fixed amount of tokens - but they don't because it is not fixed.

Couldn't they just have background agents "figure it out"

There is a setting that fixes this, I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head

There are other indications, however, like Anthropic paying through the nose for compute just months after Dario told Dwarkesh how hard it is to predict demand, or ChatGPT and Codex not quite having the same issues after Altman spent much-publicized years scrounging for trillion-dollars of capacity.

While I'm very bullish on Anthropic, I'm a bit wary about their IPO because it seems to me that they're filing now while their financials look good and before other trends like the decline of tokenmaxxing and their compute bills catch up.

It's 80% of new code they shipped that is AI authored.

Would you ship pointless code?

I do tend to agree though, it could be that AI solves problems with more code than a human would. What you need to measure is the value the code brings and how much of that is done by AI, hard to get an objective measure of that though.

I could write a bash script that copies a codebase repeatedly in the pre-AI past as well, but I didn't do that because I wasn't stupid. More than 80% of my code is now AI-generated, and trust me I'm still not stupid. It was 0% only a year ago.

Who says LoC is the only metric we should rely on? A software product should first and foremost meet user requirements, functionality and performance. Judging from the sensational rise of Anthropic's user base and revenue I think we can safely says they're in that ball pack.

Not if your spells cast their own spells.

Not if you’re claiming that the spells, once cast, automatically get exponentially spellier until they awaken into a spell god, capable of literally anything, including casting more complicated spells than any wizard is capable of. If that were true, you’d have no need for wizards. The fact that wizards are still around means it’s probably bullshit.