claude-code epilepsy warning: Do not use in production. And how to stay healthy

2025, April 12th: Anthropic, a popular AI startup Amazon is (for now) invested in, was made aware of a disastrous bug that breaks its flagship product claude-code.

2025, November 11th: the billion-dollar startup was unable / unwilling / too arrogant to fix it.

heavy screen flickering (can cause epilepsy, headaches, confusion)
- Responsible AI, my ass
highly erratic scrolling behavior
crashes
loss of productivity / waste of subscription money
Anthropic has time to release a buggy web clone of Codex, which is mostly unavailable and times out
customers notify Anthropic that they must add an epilepsy warning (!)
- Anthropic doesn't give a shit

The reason is that Anthropic (among others) uses a JavaScript lib named Ink, which has some scrolling overflow bugs.

100s of people reported the issue. [1] [2] (with video!) [3]
1. not only impairs production, but makes claude-code unusable
claude-code is closed source
1. Otherwise I would have fixed it in 10m

Workaround: CLIProxyAPI with opencode

This workaround is 100% effective

For me 😄

You can use vibeproxy or CLIProxyAPI and configure opencode to use the local proxy model endpoint. You can also add a fitting system prompt from claude-code.

Here is how to configure CLIProxyAPI:

port: 8317

remote-management:
  allow-remote: false
  secret-key: ""

auth-dir: "~/.cli-proxy-api"

debug: false
logging-to-file: false

usage-statistics-enabled: true

proxy-url: ""

request-retry: 3

quota-exceeded:
  switch-project: true
  switch-preview-model: true

auth:
  providers: []

generative-language-api-key: []

Then you create the opencode.json file in the project directory.


{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "provider": {
    "local": {
      "npm": "@ai-sdk/openai-compatible",
      "name": "Local Model Server",
      "options": {
        "baseURL": "http://10.0.0.99:8317/v1",
        "apiKey": "dummy-not-used"
      },
      "models": {
        "claude-opus-4-1-20250805": {
          "name": "Claude Opus 4.1 (Local)"
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "model": "local/claude-opus-4-1-20250805",
  "instructions": [".opencode/claude-instructions.md"],
  "autoupdate": true
}

model names are only aliases
this is a local server that uses the OAuth token
it's relatively easy to do, and
- you can also switch to OpenAI codex models easily
then cancel your subscription, of course, and consider better alternatives
- Gemini CLI did have similar issues (but they switched to a fixed fork of Ink)