261–270 of 483 posts
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.
I read the article more as an indictment of the promises being made vs reality. If we’re being told these agents are so good, why aren’t these companies eating their own dog food to the same degree they’re telling us to eat it?
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!
But the question isnt really why claude is electron based. Its that if, for some reason, it had to be native on 3 platforms, could a swarm of agents make and maintain the 3 aps while all the humans did was make the spec and tests? With your context and understanding of the coding agent's capabilities and limitations, especially Opus4.6, how do you see that going?
Huh?
Computers have gotten orders of magnitude faster since 2016, but using mainstream apps certainly don't feel any faster. Electron and similar frameworks do offer appealing engineering tradeoffs, but they are a main culprit of this problem.
Sure, the magnitude of RAM/compute "waste" may have grown from kB to MB, but inefficiency is still inefficiency - no matter how powerful the machine it's running on is.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
VSCode takes 1 GB of memory to open the same files that Sublime can do in just 200 MB. It is not remotely performant software, it sucks at performance.
I too thought VSCode's being web based would make it much slower than Sublime. So I was surprised when I found on my 2019 and 2024 ~$2,500-3,000 MacBook Pros that Sublime would continually freeze up or crash while viewing the same 250 MB - 1 GB plain text log files that VSCode would open just fine and run reliably on. At most, VS Code might say that it has disabled lexing, syntax coloring, etc. due to the file size.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guy if you can’t see the problem with a $300B SF company that of course claims to #HireTheBest having a dumpy UX due to their technical choices I don’t really know what to tell you. Same goes for these companies having npm as an out-of-the-box dependency for their default CLI tools. I’m going to assume anyone who thinks that every user’s machine is powerful enough to run electron apps, or even support bloated deps…
Who both has a computer too slow to handle electron applications ,and is spending 20$ a month on Claude code. >There are downsides though. Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes. They are often laggy or unresponsive. They don’t integrate well with OS features. A few hundred megabytes to a few gb sounds like an end user problem. They can…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell that to people abandoning Windows. (I'm writing this on a Linux machine right now) Most users are forced to use the software that they use. That doesn't mean they don't care, just that they're stuck. BTW, this going to matter MORE now that RAM prices are skyrocketing..
I'm not saying zero actual people care, I'm saying that not enough people care to actually differentiate. Is Windows getting better now that you switched? Then it doesn't matter you left.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 magi…
>if humans are machines, they are sufficiently advanced machines that we have only a very modest understanding of and no way to replicate Well, ignoring the whole literal replication thing humans do.
It is easy to crank out a one-off, flashy tool using Claude (to demo its capabilities), which may tick 80% of the development work.
If you've to maintain it, improve, grow for the long haul, good luck with it. That's the 20% hard.
They took the safe bet!