This is just the sort of bloated overcomplication I often see in first iteration AI generated solutions before I start pushing back to reduce the complexity.

Usually, after 4-5 iterations, you can get something that has shed 80-90% of the needless overcomplexification.

My personal guess is this is inherent in the way LLMs integrate knowledge during training. You always have a tradeoff in contextualization vs generalization.

So the initial response is often a plugged together hack from 5 different approaches, your pushbacks provide focus and constraints towards more inter-aligned solution approaches.

How ridiculous is it that instead of a command line binary it's a terminal emulator, with react of all things!

Kudos to them for figuring out how to complicate what should have been simple.

Implementation details aside (React??), that sounds exactly like “just a TUI”…

Interesting. On first glance that seems over engineered. I wonder what the reason is for doing it that way?

Yes yes I'm familiar with the tweet. Nonetheless they drop frames all the time and flicker frequently. The tweet itself is ridiculous when counterpoints like Vim exist, which is much higher performance with much greater complexity. They don't even write much of what the tweet is claiming. They just use Ink, which is an open-source rendering lib on top of Yoga, which is an open-source Flexbox implementation from Meta.

Depends on who you follow

There is more than meets the eye for sure. I recently compared a popular TUI library in Go (Bubble Tea) to the most popular Rust library (Ratatui). They use significantly different approaches for rendering. From what I can tell, neither is insane. I haven’t looked to see what Claude Code uses.

The further I scroll the more validated I feel for having the very same reaction.

It's AI all the way down

But it's very subsidizes when compared to API tokens, so we are all being paid by VCs to write prompts actually.