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Why is Claude an Electron app?

dbreunig.com

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#161

Post by jmalicki »

lateforwork wrote: post #151

> 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 enoug…

Both electron is too heavy for you, and the other non-Electron overhead of Claude is fine.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#162

Post by hyperpape »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #136
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.

I love the fact that we just got a model really capable of doing sustained coding (let me check my notes here...) 3 months ago, with a significant bump 15 days ago. And now the comments are "If it is so great why isn't everything already written from scratch with it?"

Ah, so it's free, but you still have to wait 3 months. Just a question...what are you waiting for?

Of course the answer is all the things that aren't free, refinement, testing, bug fixes, etc, like the parent post and the article suggested.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#163

Post by hodgehog11 »

lateforwork wrote: post #151

> 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 enoug…

I agree with your counterpoint to OS integration, but Microsoft Teams is infamous for not being "good enough" otherwise. Laggy, buggy, unresponsive, a massive resource hog especially if it runs at startup. It's gotten a bit better, but not enough. These are not complaints on HN, they're in my workplace.

Not everyone is running the latest and greatest hardware, very few actually have the money for that. If you're running hardware from before this decade, or especially the early 2010s, the difference between an Electron app and a native app is unbelievably stark. Electron will often bring the device to its knees.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#164

Post by Capricorn2481 »

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.

Because it's remarkably easier to write bugs in a code base you know nothing about, and we usually try to prevent bugs entirely, not debug them after they are found. The whole premise of what you're saying is dependent on knowing bugs exist before they hit Prod. I inherit people's legacy apps. That almost never happens.

In sufficiently complicated systems, the 10xer who knows nothing about the edge cases of state could do a lot more damage than an okay developer who knows all the gotchas. That's why someone departing a project is such a huge blow.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#165

Post by cosmic_cheese »

lateforwork wrote: post #151

> 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 enoug…

A single Electron app is usually not a problem. The problem is that the average user has a pile of Chrome tabs open in addition to a handful of Electron apps on top of increasingly bloated commercial OSes, which all compound to consume a large percentage of available resources.

This is particularly pertinent on bulk-purchased corporate and education machines which are loaded down with mandated spyware and antivirus garbage and often ship with CPUs that lag many years behind, and in the case of laptops might even have dog slow eMMC storage which makes the inevitable virtual memory paging miserable.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#166

Post by tom1337 »

I don't care wether its electron or not but the now ship a full vm with Claude which not only takes 15 GB of storage but also uses so much memory even though I just use chat. Why does that even need to be started?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#168

Post by blibble »

bcherny wrote: post #149

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!

this is you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw

if that's the case, why don't you just ask it to "make it not shit"?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#169

Post by hackingonempty »

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 have the resources to make native UI for all six major platforms without any AI assistance at all.

Maybe their dog food isn't as tasty as they want you to believe.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#170

Post by PKop »

bcherny wrote: post #149

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!

Users would benefit from native apps, hopefully you guys will give it a try. I bet Claude would be great at it too, no?
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