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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#321

Post by sarchertech »

felixrieseberg wrote: post #293

Hi, Felix here - I'm responsible for said Electron app, including Claude Code Desktop and Claude Cowork. All technology choices are about trade-offs, and while our desktop app does actually include a decent amount of Rust, Swift, and Go, but I understand the question - it comes up a lot. Why use web technologies at all? And why ship your own engine? I've written a long-form version of answers to those questions here:…

Let’s ignore electron. Your app has many UI/UX and performance flaws.

If as your CEO says “coding is largely solved”, why is this the case?

Or is your CEO wrong and coding is not largely solved?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#322

Post by dizhn »

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…

Don't the cli panes flicker like crazy?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#323

Post by harel »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #300
harel wrote: post #81

Here is what worries me the most at the moment: we're in a period of hype, fire all the developers, we have agents, everybody can code now, barrier is not low - it's gone. Great. Roll up a year from now, and we have trillions of lines of code no human wrote. At some point, like a big PR, the agent's driver will just say yes to every change. Nobody now can understand the code easily because nobody wrote it. It works,…

I think the idea is that by the time those trillions of lines of code start to cause maintenance problems, the models will be good enough to deal with those problems. We'll see, I guess...

That won't solve the problem that humans will lose the skill to write code. It will become a hobbyist pass time. Like people listening to 8-tracks now...

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#324

Post by HeavyStorm »

felixrieseberg wrote: post #293

Hi, Felix here - I'm responsible for said Electron app, including Claude Code Desktop and Claude Cowork. All technology choices are about trade-offs, and while our desktop app does actually include a decent amount of Rust, Swift, and Go, but I understand the question - it comes up a lot. Why use web technologies at all? And why ship your own engine? I've written a long-form version of answers to those questions here:…

The point is exactly that, by having a code that's completely AI driven would eliminate all trade offs that could lead you to electron.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#325

Post by sarchertech »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #305
sarchertech wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no way you or the AI wrote tests to cover everything you care about. If you did, the tests would be at least as complicated as the code (almost certainly much more so), so looking at the tests isn’t meaningfully easier than looking at the code. If you didn’t, any functionality you didn’t test is subject to change every time the AI does any work at all. As long as AIs are either non-deterministic or chaotic (s…

> As long as AIs are either non-deterministic or chaotic You just hit the nail on the head. LLM's are stochastic. We want deterministic code. The way you do that is with is by bolting on deterministic linting, unit tests, AST pattern checks, etc. You can transform it into a deterministic system by validating and constraining output. One day we will look back on the days before we validated output the same way we now…

None of those things make it deterministic though. And they certainly don’t make it non-chaotic.

You can have all the validation, linters, and unit tests you want and a one word change to your prompt will produce a program that is 90%+ different.

You could theoretically test every single possible thing that an outside observer could observe, and the code being different wouldn’t matter, but then your tests would be 100x longer than the code.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#326

Post by PacificSpecific »

selridge wrote: post #317
PacificSpecific wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's other ways to make cross platforms apps than to build them on top of a web browser

Yes, and? 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.

I disagree. It's often chosen due to lack of resources to make native applications.

If it really is a design choice then it's a bad decision imo.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#327

Post by bilalq »

bromuro wrote: post #287
rc1 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

XCode and Pages are a delight in comparison to VSCode and Notion is certainly one of the takes of all time.

XCode is usually the first example that comes to mind of a terrible native app in comparison to the much nicer VSCode.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#328

Post by whynotminot »

geetee wrote: post #309
whynotminot wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what on call means? It means Sam is 7 beers deep on Saturday night since you’re the one on call. He’s not responding to your slack messages. Claude actually is there though, so that’s kind of nice.

Sam might be 7 beers deep, or maybe he's available. In my org, oncall is just who gets the 2am phone call. They can try to contact anyone else if needed. Claude is there as long as you're paying,and I hope he doesn't hallucinate an answer.

> In my org, oncall is just who gets the 2am phone call. They can *try* to contact anyone else if needed.

Emphasis mine.

> Claude is there as long as you're paying

If you’re at a company that doesn’t pay for AI in the year 2026, you should find a new company.

> and I hope he doesn't hallucinate an answer.

Unlike human coworkers with a 100% success rate, naturally.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#330

Post by PKop »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #273
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.

Nothing about what was said even contradicts that though. Maintaining three codebases is more work than maintaining one, so they are maintaining one.

More work for whom, Claude? So what?
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