The problem is they are using the Ink library which clears and redraws for each update.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/769

I locally patched the closed-source CLI npm package but it's not perfect. They would have to switch how their TUI is rendered on their side.

Apparently OpenAI Codex is rust+ratatui which does not have this issue.

I have a hypothesis: they haven't fixed this because they're using Claude Code to develop Claude Code. I'm a fan of Claude Code, but it isn't good enough to fix tricky issues like this. And because no one looks at the codebase themselves, they haven't been able to fix it after many months. Sometimes, all we need is an engineer to sit down for the weekend and fix the damn bug, not spin up 9 different Claude Agents prompted to fix itself.

I think its clear the team is drowning. They are just trying to keep their head above water. They have massive adoption, high churn in the underlying models, and unlimited numbers of github issues opened every day.

Should it be solved by now? Yes. If anyone on the team is dogfooding it in a typical tmux environment, its painful. But lets give them some leeway here.

> it’s because they don’t want people to see what a mess their code base is.

if Amodei hadn't said "90% of code will be written by AI", at least I wouldn't call them hypocrites, but the fact that the company that makes such wild claims can't fix a freaking flicker and scroll issue until an indie-dev steps in just shows how far behind their product is from their claims.

I have CC and use many models with it (Codex in CC, try it!), but I won't let Anthropic "lecture" us about how "the roots of the problem go deep". Literally no other CLI tool has these issues: opencode, codex, gemini, droid, etc.

The joke is that AGI will be achieved when Claude Code can fix the flickering in Claude Code.

Imagine the amount of slop PRs if it was open source. They don’t want to taste their own medicine

I wouldn't be able to ship this to anyone without fixing it. Sending 5,000 lines of text to a terminal just to clear them all immediately, and in a loop... i'd be so embarrassed. Apps that clear scrollback have their uses, but you don't spam the terminal with unusable garbage.

And we solved this problem over 30 years ago? Ncurses was made for this. The buffer is kept in memory, you hit page-up and it renders the previous page, page-down and it renders the next page, let it roll and it renders each successive page as a stream, or just the last page, etc.

The biggest strength in OpenAI’s codex vs claude code is that it’s written in Rust and smooth as butter

same, also it uses like 800M of ram... like why?