Free as in puppy Edit: The title of the post originally started with "If code is free,"
Amazing
Why is Claude an Electron app?
111–120 of 483 posts
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#112Free as in puppy Edit: The title of the post originally started with "If code is free,"
what exactly does this mean (i am a puppy and don’t understand…)
same thing free as it cat means (i am a cat, meow)
it just means that it might be free for my owner to adopt me, but it sure as hell aint free for them to spoil me
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re missing the point a little friendo, it’s not that electron is bad it’s that electron itself is an abstraction for cross platform support. If code can be generated for free then the question is why do we need this to begin with why can’t Claude write it in win32, SwiftUI, and gtk? The answer of course is that it can’t do it and maintain compatibility between all three well enough as it’s high effort and…
To build gtk you are hit with GPL which sucks. To build Swift you have to pay developer fee to Apple, to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft. Which both suck. Don’t forget mobile Android you pay to Google. That is why everyone jumped to building in Electron because it is based on web standards that are free and are running on chromium which kind of is tied to Google but you are not tied to Google a…
I know Anthropic is burning cash but I'm pretty sure they can afford to pay the developer fees for those platforms.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
what exactly does this mean (i am a puppy and don’t understand…)
same thing free as it cat means (i am a cat, meow) it just means that it might be free for my owner to adopt me, but it sure as hell aint free for them to spoil me
hi kitty Σ:3 that makes sense, ty
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but if not, you cant rely on the thing that produced invalid output to validate it's own output. That is fundementally insufficient, despite it potentially catching some errors.
Damn. Guess I'll stop QAing my own work from now.
Yes. That’s not a best practice. That’s why PRs and peer reviews and test automation suite exist.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#116Because code isn't free. I can see it in my team. We've all been using Claude a lot for the last 6 months. It's hard to measure the impact, but I can tell our systems are as buggy as ever. AI isn't a silver bullet.
And after 12 months, most probably no one from your team will understand what the result of half of those bugs is. When devs outsource their thinking to AI, they lose the mental map, and without it, control over the entire system.
Only if they are supremely lazy. It’s possible to use these tools in a diligent way, where you maintain understanding and control of the system but outsource the implementation of tasks to the LLM.
An engineer should be code reviewing every line written by an LLM, in the same way that every line is normally code reviewed when written by a human.
Maybe this changes the original argument from software being “free”, but we could just change that to mean “super cheap”.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#117The framing here assumes you need to ship native to all 3 platforms to justify leaving Electron. You don't. I've been building a native macOS AI client in Swift — it's 15MB, provider-agnostic, and open source: https://github.com/dinoki-ai/osaurus Committing to one platform well beats a mediocre Electron wrapper on all three.
Yeah, like you don't need to write three different clients. You can write a native MacOS client and ship your electron client for the irrelevant platforms.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#118Because code isn't free. I can see it in my team. We've all been using Claude a lot for the last 6 months. It's hard to measure the impact, but I can tell our systems are as buggy as ever. AI isn't a silver bullet.
And after 12 months, most probably no one from your team will understand what the result of half of those bugs is. When devs outsource their thinking to AI, they lose the mental map, and without it, control over the entire system.
I think about this a lot, and do everything I can to avoid having Claude write production code while keeping the expected tempo up. To date, this has mostly ended up having me use it to write project plans, generate walkthroughs, and write unit and integration tests. The terrifying scenario for me is getting paged and then not being able to actually reason about what is happening.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Point still stands. If you are so much more productive and have some of the most expensive engineers in the world, why not write something decent
Why rewrite if thing exists? You can use those expensive engineers to build more stuff, not rewrite old stuff
Cause it's (allegedly) cheap and you can do much better? Avoiding rewriting things should become a thing of the past if these tools work as advertised.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
And after 12 months, most probably no one from your team will understand what the result of half of those bugs is. When devs outsource their thinking to AI, they lose the mental map, and without it, control over the entire system.
Only if they are supremely lazy. It’s possible to use these tools in a diligent way, where you maintain understanding and control of the system but outsource the implementation of tasks to the LLM. An engineer should be code reviewing every line written by an LLM, in the same way that every line is normally code reviewed when written by a human. Maybe this changes the original argument from software being “free”, but…
There's a pretty big difference between the understanding that comes with reviewing code versus writing it, for most people I think.