> so I expect they could make it a bunch lighter if they kept trying.

What is preventing a 1T dollars company from "keep trying"? What did they "kept trying" that got them to ship a webapp with 21mb of JavaScript?

This is a failure of their software engineering culture. Keep trying the same thing will keep doubling their JS, not halving it. That's the effect of incompetence + LLM reliance.

I wouldn't expect any better from a company that uses nextjs and React for their cli/TUI.

Yeah, culture. I expect most of the web developers at Anthropic are of the generation that considers 21MB of JavaScript a perfectly reasonable way to build a web app.