alt Hacker News> They are generating and diffing text data which has been a standard approach to drawing a TUI since the dawn of computing. It is not even remotely resource intensive
No one has ever done that. Even top[0], which does full screen refresh, clear the screen (if necessary) and write the new information (the period is in seconds, not ms). No need to diff. That would be like diffing a file, just to find which bytes to update.
[0]: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/checkout/src/usr.bin/top/display....
I don't understand why you would make such a confident negative claim rather than ask for an example or otherwise engage in discussion. Particularly given that you replied to a comment elsewhere in this very thread that links to a real world example of exactly such an implementation! [0] See in particular this part of the source. [1]
I agree that most programs don't bother to do that but please recall that my claim was merely that what Claude Code is claimed to be doing with regards to diffing is a well established and long standing optimization. The important point being that it is neither expensive, novel, or particularly complex thus not an excuse for poor performance.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405259
[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/c29071587c64efb30...