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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#361

Post by PacificSpecific »

selridge wrote: post #353
PacificSpecific wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Discord, 1Password, Slack, GitHub Desktop, VS Code. these are all also the results of bad design choices or a lack of resources?

I've used 3/5 of those programs significantly and have issues with all of them relating to software quality. Especially discord. So bad I have 4 different servers actively trying alternatives.

When discord and slack started the company was not large so it definitely could have been a lack of resources. Could also have been a bad design choice.

I'm not alone on that either at all. This is a pretty common opinion.

Claude had a chance to really show something special here and they blew it.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#362

Post by Sateeshm »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #348
legostormtroopr wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What resources? it's supposedly a solved problem. Anthropic just needs to spend tokens.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#363

Post by Sateeshm »

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!

> Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively

Why does it matter what tech the engineers used in the past? I thought they didn't write code anymore.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#364

Post by Sateeshm »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #136
yodsanklai wrote: post #34

Because code isn't free. I can see it in my team. We've all been using Claude a lot for the last 6 months. It's hard to measure the impact, but I can tell our systems are as buggy as ever. AI isn't a silver bullet.

I love the fact that we just got a model really capable of doing sustained coding (let me check my notes here...) 3 months ago, with a significant bump 15 days ago. And now the comments are "If it is so great why isn't everything already written from scratch with it?"

Well the company keeps saying coding is a solved problem.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#365

Post by selridge »

PacificSpecific wrote: post #361
selridge wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord, 1Password, Slack, GitHub Desktop, VS Code. these are all also the results of bad design choices or a lack of resources?

I've used 3/5 of those programs significantly and have issues with all of them relating to software quality. Especially discord. So bad I have 4 different servers actively trying alternatives. When discord and slack started the company was not large so it definitely could have been a lack of resources. Could also have been a bad design choice. I'm not alone on that either at all. This is a pretty common opinion. Clau…

They all have millions of active users doing complex tasks in them every day! I's laughable that you expect me to take your vague complaints about Discord seriously not just as complaints but as dispositive signs that electron was a bad design choice.

Does this work on people usually?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#366

Post by PacificSpecific »

selridge wrote: post #365
PacificSpecific wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used 3/5 of those programs significantly and have issues with all of them relating to software quality. Especially discord. So bad I have 4 different servers actively trying alternatives. When discord and slack started the company was not large so it definitely could have been a lack of resources. Could also have been a bad design choice. I'm not alone on that either at all. This is a pretty common opinion. Clau…

They all have millions of active users doing complex tasks in them every day! I's laughable that you expect me to take your vague complaints about Discord seriously not just as complaints but as dispositive signs that electron was a bad design choice. Does this work on people usually?

Discord could have been a lack of resources as I previously said. They weren't a billion dollar company when the application was conceived.

Regardless the only thing keeping those millions of people at this point is lock-in. Even then people are actively looking for ways to move away from it. I'm witnessing the migration now and am looking forward to the day I don't have to hard restart the client 2-3 times a day.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#367

Post by mvdtnz »

999900000999 wrote: post #148
ra0x03 wrote: post #109

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…

Claude desktop already doesn't support Linux.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#368

Post by willmarch »

Sateeshm wrote: post #362
NewsaHackO wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What resources? it's supposedly a solved problem. Anthropic just needs to spend tokens.

Are tokens not resources?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#369

Post by selridge »

sarchertech wrote: post #321
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?

APP BAD!

If coding SOLVED HOW COME APP BAD.

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