I would read this as a requirement for email to be 'legit' and not classified as spam.
Sure, you can send email with whatever headers you want, use weird combos, IP addresses, reply-to, and it might be still a technically valid email, but not something that should land in people's inboxes.
Also, a payment processor not testing their email on the most popular email provider in the world is quite ridiculous.
GitHub made more things free than in the past after MS acquisition, so this is driven by them, not just by users, making your 'buy their product' not really viable in this case.
I remember having to pay to have private repos in the past, but I guess MS didn't want my money and now I am a free user. If they offer stuff for free, doesn't mean it should be unreliable and best effort.
Just because you haven't or you work in a particular way, doesn't mean everyone does things the same way.
Likewise, on your last point, just because someone is using AI in their work, doesn't mean they don't have hard skills and know-how. Author of this article Mitchell is a great example of that - someone who proved to be able to produce great software and, when talking about individuals who made a dent in the industry, definitely had/has an impactful career.
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...
Although I understand your frustration (and have certainly been at the other side of this as well!), I think its very valuable to always verbalize your intuition of scope of work and be critical if your intuition is in conflict with reality.
Its the best way to find out if there's a mismatch between value and effort, and its the best way to learn and discuss the fundamental nature of complexity.
Similar to your argument, I can name countless of situations where developers absolutely adamantly insisted that something was very hard to do, only for another developer to say "no you can actually do that like this* and fix it in hours instead of weeks.
Yes, making a TUI from scratch is hard, no that should not affect Claude code because they aren't actually making the TUI library (I hope). It should be the case that most complexity is in the model, and the client is just using a text-based interface.
There seems to be a mismatch of what you're describing would be issues (for instance about the quality of the agent) and what people are describing as the actual issues (terminal commands don't work, or input is lost arbitrarily).
That's why verbalizing is important, because you are thinking about other complexities than the people you reply to.
As another example `opencode`[0] has number issues on the same order of magnitude, with similar problems.
> There seems to be a mismatch of what you're describing would be issues (for instance about the quality of the agent) and what people are describing as the actual issues (terminal commands don't work, or input is lost arbitrarily).
I just named couple examples I've seen in issue tracker and `opencode` on quick skim has many similar issues about inputs and rendering issues in terminals too.
> Similar to your argument, I can name countless of situations where developers absolutely adamantly insisted that something was very hard to do, only for another developer to say "no you can actually do that like this* and fix it in hours instead of weeks.
Good example, as I have seen this too, but for this case, let's first see `opencode`/`claude` equivalent written in "two weeks" and that has no issues (or issues are fixed so fast, they don't accumulate into thousands) and supports any user on any platform. People building stuff for only themselves (N=1) and claiming the problem is simple do not count.
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Like the guy two days ago claiming that "the most basic feature"[1] in an IDE is a _terminal_. But then we see threads in HN popping up about Ghostty or Kitty or whatever and how those terminals are god-send, everything else is crap. They may be right, but that software took years (and probably tens of man-years) to write.
What I am saying is that just throwing out phrases that something is "simple" or "basic" needs proof, but at the time of writing I don't see examples.
> What I am saying is that just throwing out phrases that something is "simple" or "basic" needs proof, but at the time of writing I don't see examples.
I have given the “never trust the judgment of someone who says it should be a one-line fix” so many times I am basically doxxing myself with this comment.
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.
I would still call that small, maybe medium. emacs is huge as far as CLI tools go, awk is large because it implements its own language (apparently capable of writing Doom in). `top` probably has a similar number of interaction points, something like `lftp` might have more between local and remote state.
The complex and magic parts are around finding contextual things to include, and I'd be curious how many are that vs "forgot to call clear() in the TUI framework before redirecting to another page".
Also it's highly multithreaded / multiprocess - you can run subagents that can communicate with each other, you can interrupt it while it's in the middle of thinking and it handles it gracefully without forgetting what it was doing
I’m going to buck the trend and say it’s really not that complex. AFAIK they are using Ink, which is React with a TUI renderer.
Cue I could build it in a weekend vibes, I built my own agent TUI using the OpenAI agent SDK and Ink. Of course it’s not as fleshed out as Claude, but it supports git work trees for multi agent, slash commands, human in the loop prompts and etc. If I point it at the Anthropic models it more or less produces results as m good as the real Claude TUI.
I actually “decompiled” the Claude tools and prompts and recreated them. As of 6 months ago Claude was 15 tools, mostly pretty basic (list for, read file, wrote file, bash, etc) with some very clever prompts, especially the task tool it uses to do the quasi planning mode task bullets (even when not in planning mode).
Honestly the idea of bringing this all together with an affordable monthly service and obviously some seriously creative “prompt engineers” is the magic/hard part (and making the model itself, obviously).
Just because Antropic made you think they are doing very complex thing with this tool, doesn't mean it is true. Claude Code is not even comparable to massive software which is probably an order of magnitudes more complex, such as IntelliJ stuff as an example.
Tools like https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono implement most of the functionality Claude Code has, even adding loads of stuff Claude doesn't have and can actually scroll without flickering inside terminal, all built by a single guy as a side project. I guess we can't ask that much from a 250B USD company.
I mostly used Sonnet/Opus 4.x in the past months, but 5.2 Codex seemed to be on par or better for my use case in the past month. I tried a few models here and there but always went back to Claude, but with 5.2 Codex for the first time I felt it was very competitive, if not better.
Curious to see how things will be with 5.3 and 4.6
For greenfield apps you can vibecode it. For existing complex apps, where existing products where customers pay us a lot of money for working software, understanding the changes and context surrounding them in the code is critical or else nobody knows how the system works anymore and maintenance and support becomes impossible.
Sure, you can send email with whatever headers you want, use weird combos, IP addresses, reply-to, and it might be still a technically valid email, but not something that should land in people's inboxes.
Also, a payment processor not testing their email on the most popular email provider in the world is quite ridiculous.
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