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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#281

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #227
hedgehog wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

God the number of ghastly survival crafting LLM slop games that are gonna appear on steam 6 months from now...

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#282

Post by fatata123 »

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!

[dead]

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#283

Post by gukov »

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)

Both Anthropic's and OpenAI's apps being this janky with only basic history management (the search primarily goes by the titles) tells me a lot. You'd think these apps be a shining example of what's possible.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#284

Post by Terr_ »

noosphr wrote: post #222
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.

Not "eating their own dog-food" may not be conclusive, but it sure is suggestive.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#286

Post by gozucito »

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!

Makes sense to me.

It's the fastest way to iterate because Electron is the best cross platform option and because LLMs are likely trained on a lot of HTML/Javascript.

Which is why Claude is great at it.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#287

Post by bromuro »

rc1 wrote: post #274
bromuro wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should repeat it over and over until all these electrons apps are replaced by proper native apps. It’s not just performance: they look like patched websites, have inconsistent style and bad usability, and packed with bugs that are already solved since tens of years in our OS. It’s like Active Desktop ™ all over. Working on a native Mac app feels just better.

> have inconsistent style You mean incongruent styles? As in, incongruent to the host OS. There is no doubt electron apps allow the style to be consistent across platforms.

No, they are also inconsistent: slack, vscode, zed, claude, chatgpt, figma, notion, zoom, docker desktop, to quote some that i use daily. They have all different UI patterns and design. The only thing they have in common is that are slow, laggy, difficult to use and don’t respond quickly to the Window manager.

Compare to other software on Mac such as Pages, Xcode, Tower, Transmission, Pixelmator, mp3tag, Table plus, Postico, Paw, Handbrake etc, (the other i use) etc those are a delight to work with and give me the computing experience I was looking for buying a Mac.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#289

Post by dmix »

noosphr wrote: post #222
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.

I'm guessing the first question will be "How are we going to keep the UI consistent?". The hard part is never the code writing it's carefully releasing fast changing features from product people. Their chat UX is the core product which is replicated on the internet and other devices. That's almost always React or [JS framework] these days.

Migrating the system would be the easier part in that regard, but they'll still need a JS UI unless they develop multiple teams to spearhead various native GUIs (which is always an option).

Almost every AI chat framework/SDK I've seen is some React or JS stuff. Or even agent stuff like llamaindex.ts. I have a feeling AI is going to reinforce React more than ever.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#290

Post by al_borland »

senordevnyc wrote: post #236
al_borland wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any examples of Anthropic saying that?

~ Coding is largely a solved problem, and 100% of his code has been written by Claude since November.

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-...

As for others, Microsoft is saying they’re porting all C/C++ code to Rust with a goal of 1m LOC per engineer per month. This would largely be done with AI.

https://www.thurrott.com/dev/330980/microsoft-to-replace-all...

If coding is a solved problem and there is no need to write code, does the language really matter at that point?

If 1 engineer can handle 1m LOC per month, how big would these desktop apps be where maintaining native code becomes a problem?

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