[ximeng]

If Claude Code is Anthropic’s main focus why are they not responding to some of the most commented issues on their GitHub? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648 has people begging for feedback and saying they’re moving to OpenAI, has been open since July and there are similar issues with 100+ comments.

[bcherny]

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. We try hard to read through every issue, and respond to as many issues as possible. The challenge is we have hundreds of new issues each day, and even after Claude dedupes and triages them, practically we can’t get to all of them immediately.

The specific issue you linked is related to the way Ink works, and the way terminals use ANSI escape codes to control rendering. When building a terminal app there is a tradeoff between (1) visual consistency between what is rendered in the viewport and scrollback, and (2) scrolling and flickering which are sometimes negligible and sometimes a really bad experience. We are actively working on rewriting our rendering code to pick a better point along this tradeoff curve, which will mean better rendering soon. In the meantime, a simple workaround that tends to help is to make the terminal taller.

Please keep the feedback coming!

[dboon]

It’s surprising to hear this get chalked up to “it’s the way our TUI library works”, while e.g. opencode is going to the lowest level and writing their own TUI backend. I get that we can’t expect everyone to reinvent the wheel, but it feels symptomatic of something that folks are willing to chalk up their issues as just being an unfortunate and unavoidable symptom of a library they use rather than seeming that unacceptable and going to the lowest level.

CC is one of the best and most innovative pieces of software of the last decade. Anthropic has so much money. No judgment, just curious, do you have someone who’s an expert on terminal rendering on the team? If not, why? If so, why choose a buggy / poorly designed TUI library — or why not fix it upstream?

[bcherny]

We started by using Ink, and at this point it’s our own framework due to the number of changes we’ve made to it over the months. Terminal rendering is hard, and it’s less that we haven’t modified the renderer, and more that there is this pretty fundamental tradeoff with terminal rendering that we have been navigating.

Other terminal apps make different tradeoffs: for example Vim virtualizes scrolling, which has tradeoffs like the scroll physics feeling non-native and lines getting fully clipped. Other apps do what Claude Code does but don’t re-render scrollback, which avoids flickering but means the UI is often garbled if you scroll up.

[tcdent]

As someone who's used Claude Code daily since the day it was released, the sentiment back then (sooo many months ago) was that the Agent CI coding TUIs were kind of experimental proof-of-concepts. We have seen them be incredibly effective and the CC team has continued to add features.

Tech debt isn't something that even experienced large teams are immune to. I'm not a huge TypeScript fan, so seeing their choice to run their app on Node to me felt like a trade-off between development speed with the experience that the team had and at the expense of long-term growth and performance. I regularly experience pretty intense flickering and rendering issues and high CPU usage and even crashes but that doesn't stop me from finding the product incredibly useful.

Developing good software especially in a format that is relatively revolutionary takes time to get right and I'm sure whatever efforts they have internally to push forward a refactor will be worth it. But, just like in any software development, refactors are prone to timeline slips and scope creep. A company having tons of money doesn't change the nature of problem-solving in software development.

[behnamoh]

> CC is one of the best and most innovative pieces of software of the last decade...

Oh come on! Aider existed before it, and so did many other TUI AI agents. I'd say Rust and Elixir were more innovation than CC.

[synapsomorphy]

That issue is the fourth most-reacted issue, and third most open issue. And the two things above it are feature requests. It seems like you should at the very least have someone pop in to say "working on it" if that's what you're doing, instead of letting it sit there for 4 months?

[bcherny]

Fair feedback — commented https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648#issuec...

[ximeng]

Thanks for the reply (and for Claude Code!). I've seen improvement on this particular issue already with the last major release, to the extent that it's not a day to day issue for me. I realise Github issues are not the easiest comms channel especially with 100s coming in a day, but occasional updates on some of the top 10 commented issues could perhaps be manageable and beneficial.

[Razengan]

How about giving us the basic UX stuff that all other AI products have? I've been posting this ever since I first tried Claude: Let us:

* Sign in with Apple on the website

* Buy subscriptions from iOS In App Purchases

* Remove our payment info from our account before the inevitable data breach

* Give paying subscribers an easy way to get actual support

As a frequent traveller I'm not sure if some of those features are gated by region, because some people said they can do some of those things, but if that is true, then that still makes the UX worse than the competitors.

[sidewndr46]

It's entirely possible they don't have the ability in house to resolve it. Based on the report this is a user interface issue. It could just be some strange setting they enabled somewhere. But it's also possible it's the result of some dependency 3 or 4 levels removed from their product. Even worse, it could be the result of interactions between multiple dependencies that are only apparent at runtime.

[bitbuilder]

>It's entirely possible they don't have the ability in house to resolve it.

I've started breathing a little easier about the possibilty of AI taking all our software engineering jobs after using Anthropic's dev tools.

If the people making the models and tools that are supposed to take all our jobs can't even fix their own issues in a dependable and expedient manner, then we're probably going to be ok for a bit.

This isn't a slight against Anthropic, I love their products and use them extensively. It's more a recognition of the fact that the more difficult aspects of engineering are still quite difficult, and in a way LLMs just don't seem well suited for.

[warkdarrior]

AGI/ASI does not need perfect terminal rendering to crush all humans like bugs.

[andersa]

Seems these users are getting it on VS code, while I am getting the exact same thing when using claude code on a Linux server over SSH from Windows Terminal. At this point their app has to be the only thing in common?

[sidewndr46]

That's certainly an interesting observation. I wonder if they produce one client that has some kind of abstraction layer for the user interface & that abstraction layer has hidden or obscured this detail?

[HumanOstrich]

> some kind of abstraction layer

You mean a terminal interface?