After several months with their top engineers and state-of-the-art AI on the job, Anthropic managed to "reduce flickering by 85%" on their TUI Claude Code client, which is built in fucking React and rendered by drawing the entire chat conversation each time (hence the flicker). I think they've since eliminated it completely by slapping some double-buffering around it (since "our client is actually a real-time game engine" after all). Meanwhile for decades Emacs and Vim have had an optimizer built into their display cores that solves for the minimum set of terminal escape commands it takes to transform the screen from a given old state to a desired new state.
You will forgive me when, between muted snickers, I express considerable doubt that Anthropic will be able to bring its AI to a point of "self-improving" any time soon.
You know, of the many criticisms I see people make, this is my canary, if claude code actually starts getting better, that would definitely remove one of the biggest question marks in my mind, that piece of software has so much strategic value for them, their entire premise is "our software gets better by itself", how is it that I still see weird UI bugs and glitches?
It's a game engine? Fine, get some good gamedevs on the team then, this is a non problem in gamedev land, heck Casey Muratori did a whole bit about performance improvements to editors, so they should be good there
Not to disagree with your point, I very much think the fact that Emacs and vim do this so well is not doing them any favours, but I'm trying to meet them where they are