To be fair, Pi only had to be useful. Claude Code had to solve the difficult unsolved problem of making a terminal print text, so naturally they built a small game engine [1]
Yes, and to solve the equally tough problem of actually writing the game engine's screen updates to the terminal, they used the log-update library which cleared the screen area it was going to update before writing the text, resulting in horrendous screen flickering.
Now, a mere human might have fixed this by removing the flicker-inducing clear-before-write, but Anthropic had a powerful AI-hammer at hand that was cleverly (after months of deep thought) able to turn this tough problem into a nail-like band-aid which they duly applied... leave the root-cause clear-before-write bug in place, and have the terminal cover it up by buffering and combining the clear+update !
Comments
To be fair, Pi only had to be useful. Claude Code had to solve the difficult unsolved problem of making a terminal print text, so naturally they built a small game engine [1]
[1] https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
Yes, and to solve the equally tough problem of actually writing the game engine's screen updates to the terminal, they used the log-update library which cleared the screen area it was going to update before writing the text, resulting in horrendous screen flickering.
Now, a mere human might have fixed this by removing the flicker-inducing clear-before-write, but Anthropic had a powerful AI-hammer at hand that was cleverly (after months of deep thought) able to turn this tough problem into a nail-like band-aid which they duly applied... leave the root-cause clear-before-write bug in place, and have the terminal cover it up by buffering and combining the clear+update !
Amazing times we live in!
Hall of fame tweet. Can't believe it hasn't even been 6 months