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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#151

Post by lateforwork »

> Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes.

I only see these complaints on HN. Real users don't have this complaint. What kind of low-end machines are you running, that Chromium engine is too heavy for you?

> They are often laggy or unresponsive.

That's not due to Electron.

> They don’t integrate well with OS features.

If it is good enough for Microsoft Teams it is probably good enough for most apps. Teams can integrate with microphone, camera, clipboard, file system and so on. What else do you want to integrate with?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#153

Post by antirez »

Cluade is an Electron app because this is a cultural issue, not a technological one. Electron could make sense if you are a startup with limited development force. For big companies that want to make a difference, to hire N developers and maintain N native apps is one of the best bet on quality and UX you can do, yet people don't do it even in large companies that have the ability, in theory, to do it. Similarly even if with automatic programming you could do it more easily, still it is not done. It's a cultural issue, part of the fact that who makes software does not try to make the best possible software anymore.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#154

Post by bromuro »

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

We should repeat it over and over until all these electrons apps are replaced by proper native apps. It’s not just performance: they look like patched websites, have inconsistent style and bad usability, and packed with bugs that are already solved since tens of years in our OS. It’s like Active Desktop ™ all over. Working on a native Mac app feels just better.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#155

Post by 4nonverbal-alit »

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?

They don't have to reinvent electron. They shouldn't need to use a whole virtualized operating system to call their web API with a fancy UI.

Projects with much smaller budget than Atrophic has achieved much better x-plat UI without relying on electron [1]. There are more sensible options like Qt and whatnot for rendering UIs.

You can even engineer your app to have a single core with all the business logic as a single shared library. Then write UI wrappers using SwiftUI, GTK, and whatever microsoft feels like putting out as current UI library (I think currently it's WinUI2) consuming the core to do the interesting bits.

Heck there are people whom built gui toolkits from scratch to support their own needs [2].

[1] - https://musescore.org/en [2] - https://www.gpui.rs

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#156

Post by [deleted] »

zarzavat wrote: post #145
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 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 ever…

[deleted]

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#157

Post by sixtyj »

collinvandyck76 wrote: post #118
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 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.

Anything bigger in context? Unfortunately - maybe I have bad luck…

But I don’t get how they code in Anthropic when they say that almost all their new code is written by LLM.

Do they have some internal much smarter model that they keep in secret and don’t sell it to customers? :)

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#158

Post by _pdp_ »

Code is not and will never be free. You pay for it one way or another. It will take a couple of years for things to cool down to realise that there is more to software than writing the code. But even if AI can write all the code - who is going to understand it. Don't tell me this is not needed. RTFM is what gives hacker the edge. I doubt any company want to be in a position where they simply have no clue how their main product actually works.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#159

Post by jimmaswell »

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.

The better the code is, the less detailed a mental map is required. It's a bad sign if you need too much deep knowledge of multiple subsystems and their implementation details to fix one bug without breaking everything. Conversely, if drive-by contributors can quickly figure out a bug they're facing and write a fix by only examining the place it happens with minimal global context, you've succeeded at keeping your code loosely-coupled with clear naming and minimal surprises.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#160

Post by astrostl »

The quality of the ChatGPT Mac app is a major driver for me to keep a subscription. Hotkeys work, app feels slick and native. The Claude Mac app I found so poor that I'd never reach for it, and ended up uninstalling it — despite using the heck out of Claude Code on a Max plan — because it started blocking system restarts for updates.
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