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0 pointstptacek2mo ago0 comments

It's actually really easy in Claude Code. Get a TUI to the point where it renders something, and get Claude to the point where it knows what you want to render (draw it in ASCII like this post proposes, for instance).

Then just prompt Claude to "use tmux to interact with and test the TUI rendering", prompt it through anything it gets hung up on (for instance, you might remind Claude that it can create a tmux pane with fixed size, or that tmux has a capture-pane feature to dump the contents of a view). Claude already knows a bunch about tmux.

Once it gets anything useful done, ask it to "write a subagent definition for a TUI tester that uses tmux to exercise a TUI and test its rendering, layout, and interaction behavior".

Save that subagent definition, and now Claude can do closed-loop visual and interactive testing of its own TUI development.

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electroly2mo ago

Can you explain tmux's contribution here? I'm confused why this process wouldn't work just the same if CC directly executed the program rather than involving tmux. Are you just using tmux to trick the program under test into running its TUI instead of operating in a dumb-stdout mode?

tptacekOP2mo ago

It allows Claude to take screenshots and generate keyboard inputs. It's like TUI Playwright.

mrstackdump2mo ago

Maybe I'm not understanding it (totally possible!) but could Claude just do that by reading standard out and writing to standard in?

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alehlopeh2mo ago

So by screenshots you mean tmux capture-pane, not actual screenshots. So in essence it is using stdout, just not Claude’s own.

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