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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#341

Post by sarchertech »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #334
sarchertech wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What kind of project lead is going to answer for their CEO?

Not a normal one but also a normal project lead doesn’t get on HN and start publicly answering questions.

If you’re gonna start speaking for and defending your company though and your company CEO has made asinine statements that are related, I’m gonna ask.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#342

Post by no-name-here »

crims0n wrote: post #244
jsheard wrote: post #21

Likewise OpenAIs browser is still only available on macOS, four months after launch, despite being built on a mature browser engine which already runs on everything under the sun. Seems like low-hanging fruit, and yet...

Probably has more to do with underwhelming adoption than anything else.

I'm guessing you're saying no one wants it? As otherwise, launching on an OS that has ~3% market share (on top of a cross-platform engine) will prevent the vast majority of adoption, yes.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#343

Post by crazygringo »

geetee wrote: post #307
crazygringo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yeah our team wrote it but everyone who built that part of it has moved to different teams or companies since."

Yeah it happens, and it's not ideal, and now instead of a risk, it's a guarantee.

Yeah but now you get an LLM to help you understand the code base 100x faster.

Remember, they're not just good for writing code. They're amazing at reading code and explaining to you how the architecture works, the main design decisions, how the files fit together, etc.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#345

Post by furyofantares »

WD-42 wrote: post #313
furyofantares wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How so? If coding is largely solved and we are on the cusp of not even needing to learn to code, then the statement that they use electron because it’s what most of their engineers are familiar with seems a little contradictory.

What's wrong with taking existing skills into consideration when making technical decisions while coding skills still matter, just because you think coding skills won't matter "in a year or two"? Where's the contradiction?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#346

Post by sarchertech »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #340
sarchertech wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1…

> None of those things make it deterministic though. In the information theoretical sense you're correct, of course. I mean it's a variation on the halting problem so there will never be any guarantee of bug free code. Heck, the same is true of human code and it's foibles. However, in the "does it work or not" sense I'm not sure why we care? If the gate only passes the digits 0-9 sent within 'x' seconds, and the code…

> If the gate only passes the digits 0-9 sent within 'x' seconds, and the code's job is to send a digit between 0 and 9, how is it non-deterministic?

If that’s all the code does, sure you could specify every observable behavior.

In reality though there are tens of thousands of “design decisions” that a programmer or LLM is gonna to make when translating a high level spec into code. Many of those decisions aren’t even things you’d care about, but users will notice the cumulative impact of them constantly flipping.

In a real world application where you have thousands of requirements and features interacting with each other, you can’t realistically specify enough of the observable behavior to keep it from turning into a sloshy mess of shifting jank without reviewing and understanding the actual spec, which is the code.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#347

Post by NewsaHackO »

PKop wrote: post #330
NewsaHackO wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you being sarcastic or playing a caricature of an AI obsessed hater?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#348

Post by NewsaHackO »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #318
NewsaHackO wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But if AI can maintain code bases so easily, why does it matter if there are 3? People use electron to quickly deploy non-native apps across different systems. 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.

No, it is completely unreasonable to ask why a company is not putting three times the resources into solving a problem than one times the resources.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#349

Post by mvdtnz »

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!

Shouldn't the AI be doing the building if your hype is to be believed? What does it matter what the team is experienced in?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#350

Post by SR2Z »

cgh wrote: post #297
ajross wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a UI that doesn't jank and max out the CPU While there are legitimate/measurable performance and resource issues to discuss regarding Electron, this kind of hyperbole just doesn't help. I mean, look: the most complicated, stateful and involved UIs most of the people commenting in this thread are going to use (are going to ever use, likey) are web stack apps. I'll name some obvious ones, though there are other candi…

You think VSCode’s ui is more complicated than eg Microsoft Excel? Or am I misunderstanding?

It definitely is, seeing as how it can embed a spreadsheet.
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