Like many of you, I watched ThePrimeagen’s recent video breakdown of Claude Code’s architecture (and Theo’s subsequent defense of React/Ink). The core of the debate—whether we should be shipping a Virtual DOM and a reconciliation engine just to render text to a terminal—stuck with me. Rather than just tweet about it, I decided to build an alternative in Rust to see what a modern, high-performance approach looks like without the web-tech overhead. Meet Flywheel. It’s a TUI compositor designed to be fast, lightweight, and capable of high frame rates without eating your CPU.
Repo: https://github.com/ccheshirecat/flywheel Crates: https://crates.io/crates/flywheel-compositor
Quickstart: cargo run --example streaming_demo --release
I’d love feedback on the architecture or thoughts from anyone else building TUIs in 2026.
