alt Hacker NewsI said relatively simple. It is mostly an API interface with Anthropic models, with tool calling on top of it, very simple input and output.
Replies
If I would get a dollar each time a developer (or CTO!) told me "this is (relatively) simple, it will take 2 days/weeks", but then it actually took 2 years+ to fully build and release a product that has more useful features than bugs...
I am not protecting anthropic[0], but how come in this forum every day I still see these "it's simple" takes from experienced people - I have no idea. There are who knows how many terminal emulators out there, with who knows how many different configurations. There are plugins for VSCode and various other editors (so it's not only TUI).
Looking at issue tracker ~1/3 of issues are seemingly feature requests[1].
Do not forget we are dealing with LLMs and it's a tool, which purpose and selling point that it codes on ANY computer in ANY language for ANY system. It's very popular tool run each day by who knows how many people - I could easily see, how such "relatively simple" tool would rack up thousands of issues, because "CC won't do weird thing X, for programming language Y, while I run from my terminal Z". And because it's LLM - theres whole can of non deterministic worms.
Have you created an LLM agent, especially with moderately complex tool usage? If yes and it worked flawlessly - tell your secrets (and get hired by Anthropic/ChatGPT/etc). Probably 80% of my evergrowing code was trying to just deal with unknown unknowns - what if LLM invokes tool wrong? How to guide LLM back on track? How to protect ourselves and keep LLM on track if prompts are getting out of hand or user tries to do something weird? The problems were endless...
Yes the core is "simple", but it's extremely deep can of worms, for such successful tool - I easily could see how there are many issues.
Also super funny, that first issue for me at the moment is how user cannot paste images when it has Korean language input (also issue description is in Korean) and second issue is about input problems in Windows Powershell and CMD, which is obviously total different world compared to POSIX (???) terminal emulators.
[0] I have very adverse feelings for mega ultra wealthy VC moneys...
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=is%3Aissu...
I’m pretty certain you haven’t used it yet(to its fullest extent) then. Claude Code is easily one of the most complex terminal UIs I have seen yet.
With extensibility via plugins, MCP (stdio and http), UI to prompt the user for choices and redirection, tools to manage and view context, and on and on.
It is not at all a small app, at least as far as UX surface area. There are, what, 40ish slash commands? Each one is an opportunity for bugs and feature gaps.