There are two different arguments here.

> These apps are doing real work taking text that is streaming in and doing syntax highlighting, calculating diffs, and rendering markdown.

The first argument is that these are expensive operations. They are not. And the second argument is the assumption that these are desirable things for an agent system to be doing. That's a personal preference but, personally, I don't want them and would appreciate a way to disable all of that to reduce CPU use.

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vmg12 20 hours ago | parent [-]

The argument is that doing it all on a single thread will result in high cpu utilization and that is what makes the power usage spike and the pc feel hot. Thats it.

A lot of people go “js is bad” reflexively and they are right for the wrong reasons. Its not because js (specifically v8) is slow. I have many websites and web based apps open and none fuck up my laptop as hard as claude code.

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hahahaa 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I don't get it we had terminals on single core machines. In early 2000s I am sure they could handle the UI of Claude (probably IO too).

	▲	wild_egg 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Early 2000s tech could absolutely handle LLM agents as a client. They output like 1-2kbps and even dial up modems would have plenty of capacity for other traffic. The UI itself requires laughably simple tech. The idea that a markdown renderer that can produce HTML at 50MB/s would use much CPU to process incoming hundreds of bytes per second is insane. CPU should be idle even if doing that constantly. Nevermind that between turns it has nothing to do whatsoever and should use zero CPU at all.