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?

This is a funny comment because it's just made up

While disaster is strong language, Claude Code isn't really a well engineered product, they're just kinda trying shit, they don't have a clear long term vision. The core prompts and agent loop are good though, it's too bad it's not open source so someone could implement them in a client with good UX/engineering (at least without disassembling claude code and being legally questionable).

> not opensource

You can extract prompts with mitmproxy/netcat, and AFAIK there isn't much more to it (bash and todo list are all you need in terms of tools), there's already a lot of simpler tools with better ux:

- sst/opencode and charmbracelet/crush -- related "cc clones" with top tier UX; opencode has near feature parity with cc, crush is more barebones

- block/goose -- a lot of multi-model features and extensions (it's practically a framework), but UI is pretty basic

- antinomyhq/forge -- similar to goose, but last week they merged some PRs with agent-agent communication, yet to see how it works out

- openai/codex, gemini-cli -- both somehow don't even have a way to resume a conversation

- avante.nvim with mcphub.nvim -- neovim plugin that emulates cursor to a degree; has a crazy good hack that makes even older models like gpt4.1 "more agentic" -- it keeps reprompting the model with "STFU and write code" until the model calls a "task_completed" tool; gets diagnostics, formatting and anything else neovim can do "for free"

For the sake of completeness, closed-source:

- amp-cli -- absolutely barebones, zero configuration (they even decide what model you're using for you); one problem -- closed source, no BYOK or subscription, pay per token only

- cursor-cli -- atm unusable, can't even set a global context file

- codebuff -- yet to try it myself, but they have some sort of an overengineered setup with 5+ different models (resoner/coder/file picker (!)/fast apply/...), curious to see how it works in practice (I'm assuming this setup is strictly worse than a single sonnet4/gpt5, but much cheaper)

Claude does have a lot of unique/rare (for now) features -- hooks, sub-agents, background jobs, planning mode, per-prompt reasoning effort controls, executable bash in slash commands.

Only half of them are really useful IMHO, but I wouldn't know that if they didn't have them.

Most of those features aren't executed well though. Hooks aren't ubiquitous and have very little transformational ability, subagents are routed poorly and lack intelligent context inheritance, etc. It is a good playground to get work done for a great price while building intuition though.

What exactly are your gripes with hooks, wdym by "transformational"? Regarding ubiquity, there's already quite a few repos with collections of hooks; I've only tried notifications and format-on-write so far, the only problem I noticed is that the provided formatting hook is confusing for the model (maybe cc could backtrack and prefill the tool call with the formatter output?)

Subagents are indeed kinda useless, but in any case, I don't see anything better right now