For those who don't want to visit X:
Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine".
For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then
-> layouts elements
-> rasterizes them to a 2d screen
-> diffs that against the previous screen
-> finally uses the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw
We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written.Interesting. On first glance that seems over engineered. I wonder what the reason is for doing it that way?
How ridiculous is it that instead of a command line binary it's a terminal emulator, with react of all things!
Implementation details aside (React??), that sounds exactly like “just a TUI”…
Kudos to them for figuring out how to complicate what should have been simple.