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With Claude Code, I created a text-based mouse GUI that simulates a 1984 Macintosh Drag-drop icons, scrollbars, resizable windows, menus Five working apps: MacWrite, MacPaint, Terminal, Calculator, and Puzzle! Telnet to port 1984 or use the web terminal link below: www.vintagecomputing.com/1984/

There's also an incomplete color demo of Win 3.x in text If you telnet to vintagecomputing.com port 1990 And I have a fully modular windowed version of this with a file explorer I am developing into my own remote terminal shell for SSH that I will eventually put on Github

The key is that I architected a new text/Telnet display engine called ASCII Processing Unit (APU): github.com/benj-edwards... It handles the terminal protocols, windows, and mouse so any app, game, or emulator can plug into it and easily make simple display calls. A modular work in progress!

It's worth noting that Claude Code could not create all of this itself. It's not a one shot-project, and yet this demo only took maybe two days of work. It required a lot of guidance and feedback from me, but the tool made it possible for me to work quickly in an iterative design loop

A couple other notes: Claude coded the web-based terminal emulator for the web version as part of a separate project I was working on. And for the Mac demo, if you don't have mouse support you can use cursor keys and space bar on a real vintage terminal!

It's decent with these simple projects but really falls apart with anything with significant complexity.

Maybe. I've been using it significantly from an API level for the last 4 years and the limitations still feel very apparent. I also worry about what will happen once these companies are tired of losing money.

That's valuable perspective, did you start with GitHub Copilot?

I started by building my own tools with APIs, back before "tools" and formatted output were a concept and using those. I've since used pretty much everything just to keep up. I don't really use any of it for my game dev work though.