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Why is Claude an Electron app?

dbreunig.com

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#211

Post by croes »

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.

You are missing the point.

It’s a difference reading code if you’re are also a writer of than purely a reader.

It’s like only reading/listening to foreign language without ever writing/speaking it.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#212

Post by croes »

whynotminot wrote: post #144
XenophileJKO wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cl…

The problem is you lose abilities if stop writing code completely.

There is a difference between a lector and an author

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#213

Post by exabrial »

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!

Boris, native app on OSX would be awesome. Totally understand the engineering decision tradeoff... but man... Electron apps are just not that great.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#214

Post by FpUser »

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 win32 you have to pay developer fee to Microsoft"

Not really, you can self sign but your native application will be met with a system prompt trying to scare user away. This is maddening of course and I wish MS, Apple, whatever others will die just for this thing alone. You fuckers leveraged huge support from developers writing to you platform but not, it is of course not enough for you vultures, now let's rip money from the hands that fed you.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#215

Post by wycx »

I have been getting claude to us free pascal/lazarus to write cross-platform (linux qt & gtk, windows and cocoa) apps as well as porting 30-year old abandoned Windows Delphi apps to all three platforms using precisely because I can end up with a small, single binary for distribution after static linking.

I hope that prevalence of AI coding agents might lead to a bit of a revival of RAD tools like lazarus, which seem to me to have a good model for creating cross-platform apps.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#217

Post by al_borland »

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!

I keep being told by Anthropic and others than these AI coding tools make it effortless to write in new languages and port code from one language to another.

This is an important lesson to watch what people do, not what they say.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#218

Post by softwaredoug »

al_borland wrote: post #217
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!

I keep being told by Anthropic and others than these AI coding tools make it effortless to write in new languages and port code from one language to another. This is an important lesson to watch what people do, not what they say.

Coding is solved. Engineering is not solved.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#219

Post by akdev1l »

alistairSH wrote: post #115
_2d30 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it is common for one to write their own tests tho

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#220

Post by qudat »

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.

100% agree. I’ve seen it with my own sessions with code agents. You gain speed in the beginning but lose all context on the implementation which forces you to use agents more.

It’s easy to see the immediate speed boost, it’s much harder to see how much worse maintaining this code will be over time.

What happens when everyone in a meeting about implementing a feature has to say “I don’t know we need to consult CC”. That has a negative impact on planning and coordination.

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