[btown]

I find Claude Desktop on macOS infinitely better at managing RAM when you have 10+ or more parallel sessions.

(Some for different aspects of full stack features, some for managing specific client situations advised by the codebase and its tools!)

The CLI is not designed to be lightweight, and it’s easy to get into situations where every CLI session consumes multiple GB of memory alone - stack them up and it’s a lot!

And not all terminal GUIs handle multiple tabs well enough to see all sessions at a glance.

So on top of the plugin features, desktop is a really useful thing to have!

[IncreasePosts]

What exactly is taking up so much space? Why does it need anything more than whatever the context is? Isn't it just sending text over an API?

[btown]

So yes, it's a TUI... but it's a TUI rendered by Ink, a React library, with a full JS runtime in the background. The number of re-renders per unit time involved with rerendering a JS implementation of flexbox every new token comes in? That's not a walk in the park for a garbage collector, and a single memory/retention leak can cascade dramatically.

I imagine this is part of the impetus behind the Bun acquisition - they have a deep need to push optimization efforts towards the specific patterns that are most relevant to their use cases. (Which are probably good ones for the broader Bun userbase, to be sure, but relative prioritization is something they now have greater control over.)