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by kstenerud 32 days ago
Claude Code will automatically "dumb" the TUI down a bit when it can't properly detect certain terminal capabilities, to avoid potential font rendering issues.

Likely there are some terminal caps that aren't being properly preserved inside of the sandbox. It's never bothered me since the agent itself works fine.
2 comments
Philip-J-Fry 32 days ago
Yeah, so whatever you're doing to wrap Claude is broken. Because it's breaking the UI.

"It's never bothered me". Cool. But your tool is bugged.

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kstenerud 32 days ago
Feel free to open a bug report if it bothers you. Or a PR.

Or feel free to avoid the tool entirely if this UI issue shakes your faith in its overall quality down to its very foundations.

This is hardly a hill to die on.

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sjagauanbdvva 32 days ago
You’re missing the point.

You claimed high quality and provided a repo.

Did you not expect someone to actually look and critique it?

Whether the visual bugs are a deal breaker or not isn’t the point.

The point is that’s not high quality code, it may work. But it’s not code I would ship at my job and therefore it’s not high enough quality for anyone serious

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kstenerud 32 days ago
Hey that's fine. You're free to make whatever judgment you wish.

But I still stand by the quality of my code, including here. You and I don't need to agree.

What decades of managing codebases (public and private, huge and small) has taught me is that there will always be an endless list of bugs and feature ideas and nice-to-haves and technical debt pressures in any given project. You'll never get to them all, so you prioritize (as I have done here). Functional bugs usually trump visual ones unless they're actually interfering with work.

Will I fix this bug? Probably, now that I'm aware of it. But there are more important matters to attend to first.

Edit: Turns out the bug comes from a mismatch with the terminal I'm using. With other terminals it looks fine. Term caps are surprisingly complicated, especially when you have multiple layers!

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gilrain 32 days ago
> But I still stand by the quality of my code, including here. You and I don't need to agree.

You aren’t having a disagreement with a person. You’re having a disagreement with reality.

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kstenerud 32 days ago
> You aren’t having a disagreement with a person. You’re having a disagreement with reality.

How so? Are you going to instruct us all on how a termcaps mismatch bug is an indicator of poor code quality, rather than an unfortunate bug emerging from within the chaos of the many layers of disparate technologies that must somehow be stitched together (along with their idiosyncrasies) in order to make a project like this work?

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hiw2d 32 days ago
tbh youve embarrassed yourself here.
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kstenerud 32 days ago
THAT must be why the stars are going up!

Thanks for explaining it for me.

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andai 32 days ago
I think you can fix that by setting an environment variable (regarding the terminal?) but it was a while since I checked. (I was running Claude as a subprocess and had similar issues.)

Also this reminds me of a principle I learned from a mentor. "People are visual buyers. If it looks good, people will think the code is good."

Unfortunately it doesn't matter whose fault the janky TUI is, people will see that and associate it with your software.

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kstenerud 32 days ago
It's more along the lines of: Anyone with an axe to grind will find something to grind it on.

Early stage products will have some rough edges. We've seen that in Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, LXC, KVM, etc. And people griped and raged about the sheer incompetence of the maintainers and utter lack of quality, but they still used those tools even before the rough edges were polished away and folks finally settled down.

The less one pays for something, the more entitled one feels to whinge and heap on abuse.

I've been down this road so much now that it's no biggie if a few Karens want to blow off steam at my expense. I'm not above exposing their silliness though ;-)

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wasabi991011 32 days ago
> Early stage products will have some rough edges. We've seen that in Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, LXC, KVM, etc.

Is your product really the same complexity as these?

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kstenerud 32 days ago
It tackles similar kinds of problems, dealing with idiosyncrasies in Linux distros (and Mac), docker, containers, kata, firecracker, seatbelt, tart, tmux, Claude, the various terminal emulators out there, and trying to herd those cats such that it doesn't blow up in your face.

Is it doing it to the same scale? No - it's a single user app. But have a look at https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/docs/dev/backe... and you'll see the kind of shit a project like this has to handle. It's not trivial.

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blanched 32 days ago
I’m not sure why you needed a gendered insult to make your point here. Surely there’s a less sexist way to imply someone is bothering you.
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pprotas 32 days ago
"This is, unfortunately, how narcissists behave. It's simply impossible for a narcissist to be wrong. They truly believe themselves to be right, all the time, and will even distort reality around them to "make" it true. And they do it all unconsciously." - kstenerud
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