Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is Claude an Electron app?

dbreunig.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 483 posts

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#221

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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.

You should definitely ignore the “I tried nothing and nothing worked” crowd.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#222

Post by noosphr »

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!

Why not just vibe code binary executables for each platform?

The sheer speedup all users will show everyone why vibe coding is the future. After all coding is a solved problem.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#223

Post by kavok »

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.

It’s amazing how often an LLM mocks or stubs some code and then writes a test that only checks the mock, which ends up testing nothing.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#225

Post by sarchertech »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #152
slopinthebag wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a false equivalence between a human being with agency and intelligence, and a machine.

Are humans not machines?

That’s something that more than half of humans would disagree with (exact numbers vary but most polls show that more than 75% of people globally believe that humans have a soul or spirit).

But ignoring that, if humans are machines, they are sufficiently advanced machines that we have only a very modest understanding of and no way to replicate. Our understanding of ourselves is so limited that we might as well be magic.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#227

Post by reitzensteinm »

hedgehog wrote: post #180
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!

As a user I would trade fewer features for a UI that doesn't jank and max out the CPU while output is streaming in. I would guess a moderate amount of performance engineering effort could solve the problem without switching stacks or a major rewrite. (edit: this applies to the mobile app as well)

Yeah, I've got a 7950x and 64gb memory. My vibe coding setup for Bevy game development is eight Claude Code instances split across a single terminal window. It's magical.

I tried the desktop app and was shocked at the performance. Conversations would take a full second to load, making rapidly switching intolerable. Kicking off a new task seems to hang for multiple seconds while I'm assuming the process spins up.

I wanted to try a disposable conversations per feature with git worktree integration workflow for an hour to see how it contrasted, but couldn't even make it ten minutes without bailing back to the terminal.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#228

Post by kavok »

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?"

I feel like people have been saying AI was great for years now?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#229

Post by geetee »

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…

"hey coworker, I know your team wrote this, can you help?" Except there is no coworker, just Claude

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#230

Post by amelius »

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!

Question from a Claude web user here.

Could you visualize the user's usage? For example, like a glass of water that is getting emptier the more tokens are used, and gets refilled slowly.

Because right now I have no clue when I will run out of credits.

Thanks!

Post reply on HN