251–260 of 483 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn’t you say coding is a solved problem? So why are you still reaching for the lowest common denominator tech stack?
ofc it is. thats why they need jarred to babysit them. just a little more amodei says we will get to agi...
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.
https://imgur.com/gallery/i-m-stupid-faster-u8crXcq
(sorry for Imgur link, but Shen's web presence is a mess and it's hard to find a canonical source)
I'm not saying this is completely the case for AI coding agents, whose capabilities and trustworthiness have seen a meteoric rise in the past year.
> 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…
Real users complain differently: "My machine is slow". Electron itself is not very heavyweight (though not featherweight), but JS and DOM can cost a lot of resources. Right now my GMail tab has allocated 529 MB.
> That's not due to Electron.
Of course, but it takes some careful thought. BTW e.g. Qt apps can be pretty memory-hungry, too.
> good enough for Microsoft Teams
It's not easy no pick a more "beloved" application.
What an Electron app usually would miss is things like global shortcuts managed by macOS control panel, programmability via Automation, and the L&F of native controls. I personally don't usually miss any of these, but users who actually like macOS would usually complain.
I personally prefer to run Electron-ish apps, like Slack, in their Web versions, in a browser.
I don't know why anyone uses Electron anymore, Tauri produces much smaller binaries and is amazing.
Tauri's story with regards to the webview engine on Linux is not great.
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
Code is not the cost. Engineers are. Bugs come from hindsight not foresight. Let’s divide resources between OSs. Let all diverge.
> They are often laggy or unresponsive. They don’t integrate well with OS features.
> (These last two issues can be addressed by smart development and OS-specific code, but they rarely are. The benefits of Electron (one codebase, many platforms, it’s just web!) don’t incentivize optimizations outside of HTML/JS/CSS land
Give stats. Often, rarely. What apps? I’d say rarely, often. People code bad native UIs too, or get constrained in features.
Claude offer a CLI tool. Like what product manager would say no to electron in that situation.
This article makes no sense in context. The author surely gets that.
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 stop there! We should refuse to accept coding agents until they have fully replaced chromium. By that point, the world will see that our reticence was wisdom.
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.