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Why is Claude an Electron app?

dbreunig.com

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#181

Post by RachelF »

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…

Teams is a terrible app, although Electron isn't the only reason for that: It needs a Gig of RAM to do things that older chat apps could do in 4 Meg.

The free ride of ever increasing RAM on consumer devices is over because of the AI hyperscalers buying all fab capacity, leading to a real RAM shortage. I expect many new laptops to come with 8GB as standard and mid-range phones to have 4GB.

Software engineers need to start thinking about efficiency again.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#182

Post by jddj »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #137
Dig1t wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> An engineer should be code reviewing every line written by an LLM, I disagree. Instead, a human should be reviewing the LLM generated unit tests to ensure that they test for the right thing. Beyond that, YOLO. If your architecture makes testing hard build a better one. If your tests arent good enough make the AI write better ones.

The venn diagram for "bad things an LLM could decide are a good idea" and "things you'll think to check that it tests for" has very little overlap. The first circle includes, roughly, every possible action. And the second is tiny.

Just read the code.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#183

Post by LordHumungous »

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.

Usually all code has an owner though. If I encounter a bug the first thing I often do is look at git blame and see who wrote the code then ask them for help.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#184

Post by Vaslo »

BoredPositron wrote: post #3

Yawn the 90/10 excuse again and 'Shipping it everywhere' is a blatant lie there is still no Linux release. Looks like you are talking about Claude Code as Claude. Claude would be the Desktop app...

Because it’s an Electron app, I use on Omarchy Linux with no problem

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#185

Post by LordHumungous »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #41

Because Anthropic has never claimed that code is free? It's pretty easy to argue your point if you pick a strawman as your opponent. They have said that you can be significantly more productive (which seems to be the case for many) and that most of their company primarily uses LLM to write code and no longer write it by hand. They also seems to be doing well w.r.t. competition. There are legitimate complaints to be m…

However there are many people out there making the argument that code is free or nearly so. I think the article is directed at them.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#186

Post by combyn8tor »

nicoburns wrote: post #172
danpalmer wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a RAM issue not a disk space issue. Binaries get loaded into memory. Also if you haven't heard, disk space is no longer as cheap, and RAM is becoming astoundingly expensive.

I'm pretty sure Tauri uses almost as much RAM, you just don't see it because it gets assigned to some kind of system process associated with the webview. Most of the RAM used by a browser is per-tab.

The process is called "webview2" on windows. From memory my Tauri app process is about 6mb memory and the webview2 is about 100mb.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#187

Post by diath »

ozim wrote: post #79
vsgherzi wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

> To build gtk you are hit with GPL which sucks.

It's LGPL, all you have to do is link GTK dynamically instead of statically to comply.

> to build win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft.

You don't.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#188

Post by LordHumungous »

throwaw12 wrote: post #84
oytis wrote: post #71

Earlier 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

Why not rewrite if code is free

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#189

Post by broast »

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.

Don't they eventually become managers and tech leads anyway and outsource to their staff?
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