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 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.
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.
And your "it's just ANSI escape codes" is the weirdest take on any kind of software.
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.
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.
Go has such frameworks, same with C# (which you can AOT compile) and so on. You're not stuck between javascript and C.
[0]: https://ratatui.rs/
If they could migrate an entire runtime to Rust why can’t they migrate CC? It’s not as if React is the only way to do declarative UI.
If you're crashing every 5 minutes, either you have a cursed build, or you need to do a memtest.
This is a product by a company worth supposedly $1trillion and they can't even make one of their starship products not shit the bad within 5 minutes? These are the same engineers telling us for the last 3 years that coding is solved?
Like it's pathetic, and it's pathetic you're falling for it too. Have some standards, good grief.
I have a literal Star Trek conception on my literal Star Trek device. Impossible to even think about how inconceivable this stuff was years ago.
And you’re complaining because they use react.
The epitome of entitlement, first world problems and privilege all together.
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.
As it is now, your post is meaningless to me.