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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

I have ~24 years of experience coding and the LAST thing I think about when opening claude code is "why is this written in react".

Tell you what I sometimes think about though: The fact it has clickable links and complex formatting rules for markdown, the most interactive and highest-quality clickable interface I've ever seen in a terminal, and somehow manages to work. That actually blows my mind.

THEN, I'm reminded that it's written in React, and I think "Huh, guess that does make it a ton easier than using ncurses or something."

And done.

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You’ve been writing code for 24 years and you don’t know that clickable links are a terminal emulator feature and not a Claude Code feature? Or that “markdown formatting” is just ansi escape codes, and possible with things other than React that don’t bring so many downsides?

Claude Code is able to hyperlink any kind of text, not just the native terminal emulator feature of hyperlinking anything starting with https://...

And your "it's just ANSI escape codes" is the weirdest take on any kind of software.

Formatted hyperlinks are an escape code too. It has nothing to do with React.

Not sure why you’re trying to bring up experience as a justification for using React to render a tui and all the downsides that come with that.

It sounds like you completely missed the point I was making: that actually implementing such a highly dynamic TUI application normally requires a significant amount of state tracking and it is significantly easier to write such apps using a functional, descriptive UI framework instead of something like ncurses.

Take it from someone who, in those 24 years, has written UIs in jquery, react and ncurses (and yeah I've tried out Ink and it's great).

"all the downsides that come with that" yeah well, while you're stuck implementing your app in the Best Possible Library, millions of people are happy using claude code and it's crazy useful.

CC is not even that complex of a TUI. It’s certainly not as complex as many of the GUI programs I use daily. And yet it’s by far the buggiest and worst performing. I don’t understand the desire to make excuses for this. The reason people use it is because it’s the only way they can afford to use Opus and Fable. If Anthropic let people use their subs with other harnesses their market share would plummet.

If they could migrate an entire runtime to Rust why can’t they migrate CC? It’s not as if React is the only way to do declarative UI.

There are fantastic TUI frameworks for Rust, like Ratatui[0] (there are a lot more options, this is an example). You can write beautiful TUIs in native languages, without ncurses or C or C++.

Go has such frameworks, same with C# (which you can AOT compile) and so on. You're not stuck between javascript and C.

[0]: https://ratatui.rs/

Yes I also used Bubbletea. I don’t know about ratatui but honestly I think the hate for react is very blind. It’s not like CC is shipping an embedded web browser. It’s a framework on top of an embedded language that has seen a crazy amount of optimisation.

Correctly emitting the right escape codes at the right positions is arguably very much a Claude Code "feature", as it is on CC to do so.

Okay and as someone who would rather just straight up use cursor than claude code, I'd rather have my software not crash out on me every 5 minutes. What sort of self respecting dev purposely uses broken software? Even opencode (use it on nonwork computers) is fully better at this point.

Disingenuous, much? I've only ever had claude code crash once (after it decided to spawn like 12 subagents and got my laptop swapping like mad).

If you're crashing every 5 minutes, either you have a cursed build, or you need to do a memtest.

It's not disingenuous, claude code has over 5k issues that are ignore plus thousands of more that were just silent closed.

This is a product by a company worth supposedly $1trillion and they can't even make one of their starship products not shit the bad within 5 minutes? These are the same engineers telling us for the last 3 years that coding is solved?

Like it's pathetic, and it's pathetic you're falling for it too. Have some standards, good grief.

I have standards.

I have a literal Star Trek conception on my literal Star Trek device. Impossible to even think about how inconceivable this stuff was years ago.

And you’re complaining because they use react.

The epitome of entitlement, first world problems and privilege all together.

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