311–320 of 483 posts
A native app is the wrong abstraction for many desktop apps. The complexity of maintaining several separate codebases likely isn't worth the value add. Especially for a company hemorrhaging money the way the Anthropic does.
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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...
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw within the first few seconds.
The full quote (in response to: should people learn programming) is "In a year or two it's not gonna matter, coding is largely solved". Which is still quite the statement, and damn the video is intolerable. But the full quote still feels a little different than how you put it here.
> 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…
These workers complain about performance on the machines we can afford. 16GB RAM and 256GB SSDs are the standard, as is 500MB/sec. internet for offices with 40 people, and my plans to upgrade RAM this year were axed by the insane AI chip boondoggle.
People on HN need to understand that not everyone works for a well-funded startup, or big tech company that is in the process of destroying democracy and the environment in the name of this quarter's profits!
BTW Teams has moved away from Electron, before it did I had to advise people to use the browser app instead of the desktop for performance reasons.
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Presumably these competent people could look at electron, think about building their own cross-platform application on top of chromium and conclude that this free as in code and beer tool fit their needs. Should they have re-written Chromium too?
You are unfamiliar with native toolkits?
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Presumably these competent people could look at electron, think about building their own cross-platform application on top of chromium and conclude that this free as in code and beer tool fit their needs. Should they have re-written Chromium too?
There's other ways to make cross platforms apps than to build them on top of a web browser
And therefore, what?
That’s what’s missing and I think we should just be clear on: it is a design choice to choose electron over writing a native app.
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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.
Nothing about what was said even contradicts that though. Maintaining three codebases is more work than maintaining one, so they are maintaining one.
Surely, it would be a flex to show that your AI agents are so good they make electron redundant.
But they don’t. So it’s reasonable to ask why that is.
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)
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Presumably these competent people could look at electron, think about building their own cross-platform application on top of chromium and conclude that this free as in code and beer tool fit their needs. Should they have re-written Chromium too?
They don't have to reinvent electron. They shouldn't need to use a whole virtualized operating system to call their web API with a fancy UI. Projects with much smaller budget than Atrophic has achieved much better x-plat UI without relying on electron [1]. There are more sensible options like Qt and whatnot for rendering UIs. You can even engineer your app to have a single core with all the business logic as a single…
What really am I to conclude by the mere fact that they used electron? The AI was not so magical that it overcame sense?
Am I to imagine that the fact that they advertise AI coding means I therefore have a window into their development process and their design choices?
I just think the notion is much sillier than all of us seem to be treating it.