[2001zhaozhao]

I mostly get this change from their side except for the extremely misleading framing. I think in response to this change, I might write an open-source Claude Code GUI wrapper to wrap over the TUI and allow accessing it from a GUI interface.

Still interactive (conforms to spirit of Anthropic's new rule), and runs Claude Code via the actual CLI (conforms to letter of Anthropic's rule), without even using the JSON output flag. It would just read the outputs directly from the terminal like a user would, and then translates the user's actions directly into actions to the Claude Code TUI.

Tradeoffs: the thinking blocks are lost, and file changes from edit tools might have to be reconstructed after-the-fact using VCS commands because the TUI doesn't display them when accept-edits mode is enabled. Requires underlying terminal to have a giant width/height in order to reliably capture the outputs by reading the terminal alone. Interactive tools like AskUserQuestion will need to work via detecting that such a prompt is open and exposing the original CLI interface to the user temporarily.

But overall it seems like it could give users most of the benefits of an interactive GUI interface (scrollable history, much higher info density, easy to copy text, browse features with mouse) while staying compliant with Anthropic's new rules both in letter and spirit. You can then build a worktree manager or whatever above this agent GUI layer. This way us interactive users can have our good tools back (and leverage the new claude -p credit for occasional automation features) while the people who are actually abusing the plan with 24/7 dark factories or openclaw are still locked out.

(the only way Anthropic would not agree to this is if they had the ulterior motive of lock-in in mind...)

[skeledrew]

I'd really love a proper CC GUI myself.

> Tradeoffs [...]

Sounds like you're thinking of scraping the raw terminal output. Consider using a terminal library (pyte[0] comes to mind) for interaction and processing the session files for tool use data, etc.

[0] https://pyte.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2001zhaozhao]

Yeah i've been thinking of hooks and reading the session file as possible ways for getting tool use data.

Also I managed to get a VSCode Claude Code wrapper working last night. It launches instances of browser-based VSCode (via Coder's code-server) with Claude Code plugin pre-installed, then hides all toolbars and opens the CC window using another bundled custom plugin. Still have a few integration problems to solve, but in theory this should be perfectly allowed by Anthropic, give you a pretty good UI, and still allow integration into an agent orchestrator using hooks/session files to get the agent data.