Overview
Chris Lloyd from Anthropic’s Claude Code team explains that Claude Code isn’t just a simple text interface, but rather functions like a game engine with sophisticated rendering architecture. The system uses React to build scene graphs, performs layout and rasterization, and generates optimized ANSI sequences within a 16ms frame budget.
Key Points
- Claude Code uses a game engine architecture instead of simple text rendering - constructs React scene graphs, performs layout and rasterization like modern graphics engines
- The system operates on a 16ms frame budget with ~5ms for React-to-ANSI conversion - enabling smooth, real-time interface updates
- Uses sophisticated diffing algorithms to minimize screen redraws by only updating changed elements - optimizing performance for complex code interfaces
- Built with React scene graphs that get rasterized to 2D screens before ANSI generation - bridging modern web UI patterns with terminal output