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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#381

Post by aembleton »

dmix wrote: post #289
noosphr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

Why does the ui need to be consistent? If its for documentation I then an llm should be able to write those instructions.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#382

Post by pjmlp »

ajross wrote: post #199
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)

> 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…

VSCode isn't a regular Electron crap application, in fact Microsoft has dozens of out-of-process plugins written in C++, Rust and C# to work around Electron crap issues, also the in-editor terminal makes use of WebGL instead of div and p soup.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#384

Post by reitzensteinm »

frizlab wrote: post #379
reitzensteinm wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're generally pretty solid. Once an hour one will crash, and sometimes there are performance problems, but it's a very workable setup.

> Once an hour one will crash, and sometimes there are performance problems > pretty solid Huh?

Claude Code would have been science fiction five years ago. I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth over a few papercuts.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#385

Post by no-name-here »

greazy wrote: post #245
senordevnyc wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they say that? I doubt it.

They did, with the caveat that its solved" for most use cases". https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-...

I would have expected the non-solved-cases to be the relatively unique ones, but considering the plethora of both A) non-Electron desktop apps, and B) coding agents (Copilot/Windsurf/Cursor/Codex/OpenCode/Qwen/Amazon Kiro/Devin/JetBrains AI/Gemini CLI/Gemini Code Assist/Antigravity/Warp/Kilocode/Cline/RooCode/Atlassian Rovo/Claude Code/etc), it seems like neither of the building blocks is very rare - perhaps Claude is just incapable of putting it together?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#386

Post by xigoi »

ajross wrote: post #299
clipsy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might try giving an example of a complex UI that isn't a frustratingly slow resource hog next time you're posting this rant.

> complex UI that isn't a frustratingly slow resource hog Maybe you can give ones of competing ones of comparable complexity that are clearly better? Again, I'm just making a point from existence proof. VSCode wiped the floor with competing IDEs. GMail pushed its whole industry to near extinction, and (again, just to call this out explicitly) Amazon has shipped what I genuinely believe to be the single most complicat…

> Maybe you can give ones of competing ones of comparable complexity that are clearly better?

Thunderbird is a fully-featured mail app and much more performant than Gmail. Neovim has more or less the same feature set as VSCode and its performance is incomparably better.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#387

Post by no-name-here »

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.

1. Anthropic has no problem burning tens of thousands of dollars of tokens on things that have zero real-world value, such as implementing a C compiler that as far as I can tell they don't intend to be used in the real world - for example, they announced it on Feb 5, promising "Over the coming days, I’ll continue having Claude push new changes if you want to follow along with Claude’s continued attempts at addressing these limitations" but there have been zero code commits since Feb 5 (the day they announced it). Wouldn't it make far more sense for a company to invest tokens into their own product than burning them for something that may be abandoned within hours of launching, with zero ongoing value to their company or their customers?

2. Why do you think it requires "three times the resources" - wouldn't it normally be an incremental amount of work to support additional targets, but not an additional 100% of work for each additional target?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#388

Post by no-name-here »

selridge wrote: post #122
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…

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?

> Should they have re-written Chromium too?

1. Anthropic had no problem spending tens of thouands of dollars of tokens re-writing the C compiler a couple weeks ago before abandonining it within hours of launch, despite promising that fixes were coming in the following days. 2. Regardless are you arguing that re-writing Chromium would have been a good solution for the original suggestion of native apps? Aren't there better existing approaches from companies that don't claim to have the best coders, nor are worth hundreds of millions, billions, tens of billions, nor hundreds of billions of dollars, so I'm unsure why you made that specific suggestion? Wouldn't pointing to an existing product's native approach be a better suggestion?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#389

Post by xigoi »

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?

Appeal to popularity fallacy.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#390

Post by xigoi »

throwaw12 wrote: post #84
oytis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point still stands. If you are so much more productive and have some of the most expensive engineers in the world, why not write something decent

Why rewrite if thing exists? You can use those expensive engineers to build more stuff, not rewrite old stuff

Why did they create Claude if ChatGPT already existed?
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