Most people’s mental model of Claude Code is that “it’s just a TUI” but it should really be closer to “a small game engine”.

For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then:

-> layout elements

-> rasterize them to a 2d screen

-> diff that against the previous screen

-> finally use the diff to generate ANSI sequences to draw

We have a ~16ms frame budget so we have roughly ~5ms to go from the React scene graph to ANSI written.

— Chris Lloyd (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699072#46706040), Claude Code team at Anthropic

Tags: react (https://simonwillison.net/tags/react), claude-code (https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-code)