alt Hacker NewsThe UI flickers rapidly in some cases when I use it in the VSCode terminal. When I first saw this when using Claude Code I imagined it was some vibe code bug that would be worked out quickly. But it's been like 9 months and still every day it has this behavior - to the point that it crashes VSCode! I can only imagine that no one at Anthropic uses VSCode because it really seems insane it's gone this long unfixed.
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The VSCode terminal seems buggy with complex TUI applications in my experience; I had to use the Gemini CLI in a separate terminal because it was brutally slow in the VSC terminal.
That being said, this isn't a huge issue for CC - you can just use the extension, which offers a similar experience.
They have a thread on that.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2001439019713073626
I don't have that problem using it on iTerm2 however. I also don't use Tmux with it.
Same thing happens to me in long enough sessions in xterm. Anecdotally it's pretty much guaranteed if I continue a session close to the point of context compacting, or if the context suddenly expands with some tool call.
Edit: for a while I thought this was by design since it was a very visceral / graphical way to feel that you're hitting the edge of context and should probably end the session.
If I get to the flicker point I generally start a new session. The flicker point always happens though from what I have observed.
That one's definitely annoying, but I suspect that's due to some bad initial design choices (React for a terminal app!) and I think it's definitely better than it used to be.
Perhaps it’s a bug in the VS code terminal? I don’t see anything like this in Kitty.
Are you sure it's _not_ VS Code at issue here? I haven't seen this in Ghostty.
> The UI flickers rapidly in some cases
It's the worst experience in tmux! They lectured us about how the roots of the problem go deep, but I don't have this issue with any other CLI agent tool like Codex.