The UI flickers rapidly in some cases when I use it in the VSCode terminal. When I first saw this when using Claude Code I imagined it was some vibe code bug that would be worked out quickly. But it's been like 9 months and still every day it has this behavior - to the point that it crashes VSCode! I can only imagine that no one at Anthropic uses VSCode because it really seems insane it's gone this long unfixed.
It's the worst experience in tmux! They lectured us about how the roots of the problem go deep, but I don't have this issue with any other CLI agent tool like Codex.
The VSCode terminal seems buggy with complex TUI applications in my experience; I had to use the Gemini CLI in a separate terminal because it was brutally slow in the VSC terminal.
That being said, this isn't a huge issue for CC - you can just use the extension, which offers a similar experience.
Same thing happens to me in long enough sessions in xterm. Anecdotally it's pretty much guaranteed if I continue a session close to the point of context compacting, or if the context suddenly expands with some tool call.
Edit: for a while I thought this was by design since it was a very visceral / graphical way to feel that you're hitting the edge of context and should probably end the session.
If I get to the flicker point I generally start a new session. The flicker point always happens though from what I have observed.
That one's definitely annoying, but I suspect that's due to some bad initial design choices (React for a terminal app!) and I think it's definitely better than it used to be.
OK, so you have the unbearable pain of using a separate terminal app to use the magic thingie that does your programming for you on prompt, and which didn't exist merely 2 years ago.
I am a fan of Claude code, I love it, I use it every day. Are you suggesting we’re not allowed to make any critique of anything which has good qualities?
