This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen. Researchers are getting rewarded with VC money to try what remains a science experiment. That used to be a bad word and now that gets rewarded with billions of dollars in valuation.
The specific issue you linked is related to the way Ink works, and the way terminals use ANSI escape codes to control rendering. When building a terminal app there is a tradeoff between (1) visual consistency between what is rendered in the viewport and scrollback, and (2) scrolling and flickering which are sometimes negligible and sometimes a really bad experience. We are actively working on rewriting our rendering code to pick a better point along this tradeoff curve, which will mean better rendering soon. In the meantime, a simple workaround that tends to help is to make the terminal taller.
Please keep the feedback coming!
CC is one of the best and most innovative pieces of software of the last decade. Anthropic has so much money. No judgment, just curious, do you have someone who’s an expert on terminal rendering on the team? If not, why? If so, why choose a buggy / poorly designed TUI library — or why not fix it upstream?
Other terminal apps make different tradeoffs: for example Vim virtualizes scrolling, which has tradeoffs like the scroll physics feeling non-native and lines getting fully clipped. Other apps do what Claude Code does but don’t re-render scrollback, which avoids flickering but means the UI is often garbled if you scroll up.
Tech debt isn't something that even experienced large teams are immune to. I'm not a huge TypeScript fan, so seeing their choice to run their app on Node to me felt like a trade-off between development speed with the experience that the team had and at the expense of long-term growth and performance. I regularly experience pretty intense flickering and rendering issues and high CPU usage and even crashes but that doesn't stop me from finding the product incredibly useful.
Developing good software especially in a format that is relatively revolutionary takes time to get right and I'm sure whatever efforts they have internally to push forward a refactor will be worth it. But, just like in any software development, refactors are prone to timeline slips and scope creep. A company having tons of money doesn't change the nature of problem-solving in software development.