Claude Code Checkpoints

If Claude Code LLMs are reportedly so good, then why is the Claude Code CLI such a buggy, messy, featureless disaster? Are they dogfooding?

Eesh, a disaster? I use it daily to do some pretty impressive things. Wouldn’t call it a disaster.

Some of the user interaction borders on "disaster" IMO. One puts up with it because it's not a show-stopper for the core value proposition of the software (an LLM agent completing tasks for you), and the core value proposition of the software is really valuable.

The noticeable issues are (1) unpredictable scrolling of the terminal window and (2) a super-buggy text box for inputting the prompt.

In particular if I mash the arrow key too fast while moving around and editing the prompt CC and my terminal's idea of where the cursor is get out of sync somehow and it's tricky to get them re-aligned, and I can't actually input text until I do. The vim mode lets me bypass this but it has its own bugs and is missing a ton of features that I expect. Visual selection in particular seems to be missing? Not entirely certain what things I'm used to are stock vim features vs Spacemacs features but I'm pretty sure visual mode is the former. Regardless, only the very basics seem to actually work. "w", "b", "e", "cw/b/e", "dw/b/e", "esc/i".

So for the most part I actually just edit CC prompts in emacs and paste them.

I resort to this workaround because I am very motivated to use Claude Code. For a less-useful piece of software I would probably just give up.

I've built terminal applications and when not using a dedicated alternate buffer, things like multiline text input and navigation are so easy to screw up. Not to mention when you have to do all the tricks to properly detect key strokes, pastes, etc. It's a mess of printing special codes and carriage returns.

I'm guessing they're using abstraction of some sort, but imo they've done a lot of great features and definitely usable.

That being said- they could just build / use something more like a jupyter notebook and have a wildly more stable and rich experience. Or a classic tui app, but pros and cons.