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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#141

Post by selridge »

zamadatix wrote: post #98
selridge wrote: post #20

Why stop there! We should refuse to accept coding agents until they have fully replaced chromium. By that point, the world will see that our reticence was wisdom.

The article already concludes coding agents have uses in areas they already do well. What specifically can be continued leading you to think should instead not be used?

The claim that somehow "code is free now" is struck low by anthropic choosing electron is silly and deserves ridicule.

I guess I don't understand how people don't see something like 20k + an engineer-month producing CCC as the actual flare being shot into the night that it is. Enough to make this penny ante shit about "hurr hurr they could've written a native app" asinine.

They took a solid crack at GCC, one of the most complex things *made by man* armed with a bunch of compute, some engineers guiding a swarm, and some engineers writing tests. Does it fail at key parts? Yes. It is a MIRACLE and a WARNING that it exists at all? YES. Do you know what you would have with an engineer-month and 20k in compute trying to write GCC from scratch in 2 weeks in 2024? A whole heck of a lot less than they got.

This notion that everything is the same just didn't make contact on 2025, and we're in 2026 now. All of software is already changing and HN is full of wanking about all the wrong stuff.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#142

Post by ffsm8 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #107
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't Claude doing QA testing for you?

Why isn't it doing it for Anthropic ?

What makes you think it isn't?

They just have a lot of users doing QA to, and ignore any of their issues like true champs

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#143

Post by PacificSpecific »

selridge wrote: post #122
ra0x03 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guy if you can’t see the problem with a $300B SF company that of course claims to #HireTheBest having a dumpy UX due to their technical choices I don’t really know what to tell you. Same goes for these companies having npm as an out-of-the-box dependency for their default CLI tools. I’m going to assume anyone who thinks that every user’s machine is powerful enough to run electron apps, or even support bloated deps…

Presumably these competent people could look at electron, think about building their own cross-platform application on top of chromium and conclude that this free as in code and beer tool fit their needs. Should they have re-written Chromium too?

There's other ways to make cross platforms apps than to build them on top of a web browser

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#144

Post by whynotminot »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #140
reconnecting wrote: post #96

Earlier 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.

I find this such a weird stance to take. Every system I work on and bug I fix has broad sets of code that I didn't write in it. Often I didn't write any of the code I am debugging. You have to be able to build a mental map as you go even without ai.

Yeah. Everyone sort of assumes that not having personally written the code means they can’t debug it.

When is the last time you had an on call blow up that was actually your code?

Not that I’m some savant of code writing — but for me, pretty much never. It’s always something I’ve never touched that blows up on my Saturday night when I’m on call. Turns out it doesn’t really change much if it’s Sam who wrote it … or Claude.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#145

Post by zarzavat »

reconnecting wrote: post #96
yodsanklai wrote: post #34

Because 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 agree, but you don't have to outsource your thinking to AI in order to benefit from AI.

Use AI as a sanity check on your thinking. Use it to search for bugs. Use it to fill in the holes in your knowledge. Use it to automate grunt work, free your mind and increase your focus.

There are so many ways that AI can be beneficial while staying in full control.

I went through an experimental period of using Claude for everything. It's fun but ultimately the code it generates is garbage. I'm back to hand writing 90% of code (not including autocomplete).

You can still find effective ways to use this technology while keeping in mind its limitations.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#146

Post by vips7L »

Dig1t wrote: post #116
reconnecting wrote: post #96

Earlier 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…

The majority of devs I meet are extremely lazy. It’s why so many people are outsourcing their jobs to Claude.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#147

Post by selridge »

rustystump wrote: post #125
selridge wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably these competent people could look at electron, think about building their own cross-platform application on top of chromium and conclude that this free as in code and beer tool fit their needs. Should they have re-written Chromium too?

Bun exists and building a ui on too of that should be well within the power of the money they have. No one is saying to rebuild the universe but the current state is embarrassing.

Yeah but what does the statement refute?

We can all talk about how this or that app should be different, but the idea is "electron sux => ????? "

Why should I care that they didn't rebuild the desktop app I don't use. Their TUI is really nice.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#148

Post by 999900000999 »

ra0x03 wrote: post #109
llbbdd wrote: post #87

This post and this entire thread are HN-sniping to the millionth degree. We have all the classics here: - AI bad - JavaScript bad - Developers not understanding why Electron has utility because they don't understand the browser as a fourth OS platform - Electron eats my ram oh no posted from my 2gb thinkpad

My guy if you can’t see the problem with a $300B SF company that of course claims to #HireTheBest having a dumpy UX due to their technical choices I don’t really know what to tell you. Same goes for these companies having npm as an out-of-the-box dependency for their default CLI tools. I’m going to assume anyone who thinks that every user’s machine is powerful enough to run electron apps, or even support bloated deps…

Who both has a computer too slow to handle electron applications ,and is spending 20$ a month on Claude code.

>There are downsides though. Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes. They are often laggy or unresponsive. They don’t integrate well with OS features.

A few hundred megabytes to a few gb sounds like an end user problem. They can either make room or not use your application.

You can easily buy a laptop for around 400 USD that will run Claude code just fine, along with several other electron apps.

Don't get me wrong, native everything ( which would probably mean sacrificing Linux support) would be a bit better, but it's not a deal breaker.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#149

Post by bcherny »

Boris from the Claude Code team here.

Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it.

That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#150

Post by [deleted] »

reconnecting wrote: post #96
yodsanklai wrote: post #34

Because 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.

[deleted]
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