Most of the value of Claude Code comes from the model, and that's not running on your device.
The Claude Code TUI itself is a front end, and should not be taking 3-4 seconds to load. That kind of loading time is around what VSCode takes on my machine, and VSCode is a full blown editor.
It’s orders of magnitude slower than Helix, which is also a full blown editor.
When all your other tools are fast and well engineered, slow and bloated is very noticeable.