The Software Crisis Is Just Us "Vibe Coding" React Into a Terminal

I haven’t been able to get this video by ThePrimeagen out of my head. It’s living rent-free in there, not because the tech is cool, but because it feels like staring directly into the sun of modern engineering absurdity.

The TL;DW

Anthropic built Claude Code, their agentic CLI tool. It’s a text-based interface. It runs in your terminal. And they built it with React.

Specifically, they are treating a terminal window (a grid of characters) like a game engine. They are targeting 60 FPS. They have a rendering pipeline that goes: Construct React Scene Graph → Layout → Rasterize → Diff against previous frame → Generate ANSI escape codes.

According to the video, building the React scene graph takes roughly 11ms. The frame budget for 60fps is 16ms. That leaves about 5ms for the actual work of putting text on the screen. They are literally red-lining a CPU core just to render a “throbbing” loading spinner and some monospace text.

The Flashback

Watching Primeagen lose his mind over this transported me back 16 years. I was a fresh apprentice, and my Berufsbildner (vocational trainer) sat us down for a grave talk about the Software Crisis.

He told us about the 1968 NATO conference where the term was coined. The warning was simple: hardware power was outpacing our ability to manage the complexity of the software we ran on it. He warned us that without discipline, we would create unmaintainable monsters.

Back then, I thought “complexity” meant managing memory pointers in C or untangling COBOL spaghetti.

The Crisis Is a Skill Issue

16 years later, seeing Claude Code is just the latest, and maybe the greatest, confirmation of what I’ve suspected for a long time. The modern software crisis isn’t that the problems are too hard. It’s that we are terrified of leaving our comfort zones.

As Will McGugan points out, this is “tunneling through a mountain”. Instead of walking around the mountain (using immediate mode rendering, or literally any tool designed for text), the engineers felt more comfortable with React components. So they spent massive engineering effort forcing the DOM model into a TUI.

We aren’t suffering from a lack of computing power, we are drowning in accidental complexity. We have machines that are astronomically faster than the ones in 1968, and we burn all that power reconciling a Virtual DOM to print the letter ‘A’ to standard out.

The Verdict

The irony is apparent. The company promising to revolutionize programming with AI is struggling to make a terminal app run at 60fps because they insisted on using a web framework to do it.

My Berufsbildner was right about the crisis, but he got the cause wrong. The code didn’t organically become too complex, we just started actively choosing familiarity over sanity.

We didn’t solve the software crisis. We just rebranded it as “vibe coding,” and at this point, I’m afraid we’re stuck with it.