6 ms·

Maybe I'm taking crazy pills, but I swore there have been very similar comments I've seen as the current top post by weakfish: > Maybe I’m taking crazy pills,

by harrisi 2mo ago

Maybe I'm taking crazy pills, but I swore there have been very similar comments I've seen as the current top post by weakfish: > Maybe I’m taking crazy pills, but I’m still stuck on “why the hell does a TUI need to run in terminal React by way of JavaScript” > The fact that Anthropic felt the need to buy a runtime so they could make their TUI better speaks more to the quality of engineering than anything else IMO. > If rewrites are so easy, why not rewrite CC in a native language? Would’ve been a hell of a lot cheaper. It turns out, there's some similar sentiments in the last year ish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47105720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124596 I'm not a fan of any of the technologies, companies, or people related to this. I just couldn't shake the feeling that I've seen similar comments. September and all.

harrisi 2mo ago
I don't want to edit this to change the narrative, but I wanted to clarify that I'm not not a fan of all of the technologies or people related to this. As far as compan{y,ies} go, though, well..
vdfs 2mo ago
Maybe because the 1st thing any experienced technical person would think about? It's like rebuilding and optimizing the racing track to make F1 run faster.
- harrisi 2mo ago
  Perhaps. The thing I was trying to highlight more is comments (particularly disapproving ones) about the intersection of JavaScript (especially React, apparently), TUIs, and LLMs. I just thought it was interesting. I'm a fan of TUIs, both positive and negative about JavaScript (the modern language is quite nice, given you avoid the historical warts, in my opinion - the ecosystem is unfortunate), and I think the best description for how I feel about LLMs is that I'm bearish. Also Simon is a fantastically prolific and intelligent person though, even though LLMs are not my cup of tea. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960912 is a recent comment by someone I also respect related to how LLMs recreate human-like content (Widgets, really), making actual human-created content feel fake. Sometimes it sure does feel like ELIZA is the main news source these days.
- scrollaway 2mo ago
  I have ~24 years of experience coding and the LAST thing I think about when opening claude code is "why is this written in react". Tell you what I sometimes think about though: The fact it has clickable links and complex formatting rules for markdown, the most interactive and highest-quality clickable interface I've ever seen in a terminal, and somehow manages to work. That actually blows my mind. THEN, I'm reminded that it's written in React, and I think "Huh, guess that does make it a ton easier than using ncurses or something." And done.
  - slopinthebag 2mo ago
    You’ve been writing code for 24 years and you don’t know that clickable links are a terminal emulator feature and not a Claude Code feature? Or that “markdown formatting” is just ansi escape codes, and possible with things other than React that don’t bring so many downsides?
    - scrollaway 2mo ago
      Claude Code is able to hyperlink any kind of text, not just the native terminal emulator feature of hyperlinking anything starting with https://... And your "it's just ANSI escape codes" is the weirdest take on any kind of software.
      - slopinthebag 2mo ago
        Formatted hyperlinks are an escape code too. It has nothing to do with React. Not sure why you’re trying to bring up experience as a justification for using React to render a tui and all the downsides that come with that.
        scrollaway 2mo ago
        It sounds like you completely missed the point I was making: that actually implementing such a highly dynamic TUI application normally requires a significant amount of state tracking and it is significantly easier to write such apps using a functional, descriptive UI framework instead of something like ncurses. Take it from someone who, in those 24 years, has written UIs in jquery, react and ncurses (and yeah I've tried out Ink and it's great). "all the downsides that come with that" yeah well, while you're stuck implementing your app in the Best Possible Library, millions of people are happy using claude code and it's crazy useful.
dundarious 2mo ago
What's the implication or inference based upon this? So you're seeing comments sharing a general attitude. And? As it is now, your post is meaningless to me.
lionkor 2mo ago
It's because rewrites are almost always a bad decision. Best case, it's a naive decision made by people who don't know better, worst case it kills the product (who here uses netscape?). So, from the start, people will be skeptical of a "we rewrote xyz in Rust" because it rarely works out. But there's a lot more to this, in fact it's a little bit loaded with "tech bro" ideas: - Rewriting in Rust - Rewriting using AI - Making terminal apps in JS - Zig (a lot of people's dear language) is involved somehow This attracts every single skeptical developer. The only thing missing is maybe blockchain, if that was still cool. It just hits all the "what? why?" spots. I was already writing a comment, when I realized that what I wanted to write had already been said by the top comment. I suppose that's why comments read so similarly.

by harrisi 2mo ago

harrisi 2mo ago

I don't want to edit this to change the narrative, but I wanted to clarify that I'm not not a fan of all of the technologies or people related to this. As far as compan{y,ies} go, though, well..

vdfs 2mo ago

Maybe because the 1st thing any experienced technical person would think about? It's like rebuilding and optimizing the racing track to make F1 run faster.

harrisi 2mo ago
Perhaps. The thing I was trying to highlight more is comments (particularly disapproving ones) about the intersection of JavaScript (especially React, apparently), TUIs, and LLMs. I just thought it was interesting. I'm a fan of TUIs, both positive and negative about JavaScript (the modern language is quite nice, given you avoid the historical warts, in my opinion - the ecosystem is unfortunate), and I think the best description for how I feel about LLMs is that I'm bearish. Also Simon is a fantastically prolific and intelligent person though, even though LLMs are not my cup of tea. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960912 is a recent comment by someone I also respect related to how LLMs recreate human-like content (Widgets, really), making actual human-created content feel fake. Sometimes it sure does feel like ELIZA is the main news source these days.
scrollaway 2mo ago
I have ~24 years of experience coding and the LAST thing I think about when opening claude code is "why is this written in react". Tell you what I sometimes think about though: The fact it has clickable links and complex formatting rules for markdown, the most interactive and highest-quality clickable interface I've ever seen in a terminal, and somehow manages to work. That actually blows my mind. THEN, I'm reminded that it's written in React, and I think "Huh, guess that does make it a ton easier than using ncurses or something." And done.
- slopinthebag 2mo ago
  You’ve been writing code for 24 years and you don’t know that clickable links are a terminal emulator feature and not a Claude Code feature? Or that “markdown formatting” is just ansi escape codes, and possible with things other than React that don’t bring so many downsides?
  - scrollaway 2mo ago
    Claude Code is able to hyperlink any kind of text, not just the native terminal emulator feature of hyperlinking anything starting with https://... And your "it's just ANSI escape codes" is the weirdest take on any kind of software.
    - slopinthebag 2mo ago
      Formatted hyperlinks are an escape code too. It has nothing to do with React. Not sure why you’re trying to bring up experience as a justification for using React to render a tui and all the downsides that come with that.
      - scrollaway 2mo ago
        It sounds like you completely missed the point I was making: that actually implementing such a highly dynamic TUI application normally requires a significant amount of state tracking and it is significantly easier to write such apps using a functional, descriptive UI framework instead of something like ncurses. Take it from someone who, in those 24 years, has written UIs in jquery, react and ncurses (and yeah I've tried out Ink and it's great). "all the downsides that come with that" yeah well, while you're stuck implementing your app in the Best Possible Library, millions of people are happy using claude code and it's crazy useful.

dundarious 2mo ago

What's the implication or inference based upon this? So you're seeing comments sharing a general attitude. And? As it is now, your post is meaningless to me.

lionkor 2mo ago

It's because rewrites are almost always a bad decision. Best case, it's a naive decision made by people who don't know better, worst case it kills the product (who here uses netscape?). So, from the start, people will be skeptical of a "we rewrote xyz in Rust" because it rarely works out. But there's a lot more to this, in fact it's a little bit loaded with "tech bro" ideas: - Rewriting in Rust - Rewriting using AI - Making terminal apps in JS - Zig (a lot of people's dear language) is involved somehow This attracts every single skeptical developer. The only thing missing is maybe blockchain, if that was still cool. It just hits all the "what? why?" spots. I was already writing a comment, when I realized that what I wanted to write had already been said by the top comment. I suppose that's why comments read so similarly.