This is such a litmus test for a tool that "in few months will be writing 90% of all code". If a multi-billion dollar bleeding edge company can't use Claude Code to create and maintain a native GUI then no one else stands a chance.
Why is Claude an Electron app?
391–400 of 483 posts
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#392Earlier 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.
They could easily maintain one in Qt but it seems they aren't even capable of that?
One thing to consider is that "native" apps are considered the gold standard of desktop UIs, but a overwhelming share of users… don’t care. I, for one, don’t necessarily enjoy Qt apps. I think the only one I still use is KeepassXC and it’s trash to me, just slightly better than Keepass2. I much prefer the Bitwarden Electron app.
Given the choice, I often reach for Electron apps because they feel more feature rich, feel better designed in terms of polish (both UI and UX), and I rarely get resource hog issues (Slack is the only offender I can think of among the Electron apps I use)
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#393Boris 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!
I’m okay with Electron. I’ve used great Electron apps (VSCode). I like that the feature set is the same between the website and the app. But it should be possible to make an Electron app that is more reliable and eats less resources.
Shouldn't Anthropic just prompt Claude to "make an Electron app, but more reliable and eats less resource?" That easy right?
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#394Earlier 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.
> 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.
Because then their competition would work faster than they could and any amount of slop/issues/imperfections would be amplified threefold.
Also there would inevitably be some feature drift - I got SourceTree for my Mac and was surprised to discover that it's actually somewhat different from the Windows version, that was a bit jarring.
I hope that in the next decade we get something like lcl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library), but for all OSes and with bindings for all common languages - so we don't have to rely on the web platform for local software, until then developing native apps is a hard sell.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#395Boris 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!
Seems pretty sensible!
I always wonder how those established Electron codebases would map over to something that uses the system specific WebViews and how broken (or not) those would prove to be:
But admittedly that would just decrease the bundle size while doing not much for the performance or resource usage: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso... so maybe not super relevant to this particular discussion.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article already concludes coding agents have uses in areas they already do well. What specifically can be continued leading you to think should instead not be used?
The claim that somehow "code is free now" is struck low by anthropic choosing electron is silly and deserves ridicule. I guess I don't understand how people don't see something like 20k + an engineer-month producing CCC as the actual flare being shot into the night that it is. Enough to make this penny ante shit about "hurr hurr they could've written a native app" asinine. They took a solid crack at GCC, one of the m…
The title is indeed silly and a poor choice but it's not the argument actually made in the article.
The title doesn't even seem to be intended as a shot in the night, despite that being how most of the HN took it. I.e. the author isn't saying "don't use agents because Claude Code is written in Electron" they are genuinely looking at why one would still have their agents write an Electron app over native when using coding agents.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#397Earlier 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…
Gmail was free, undercutting has always worked. Amazon does similar.
Using market success to excuse poor UX is pointless.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
>claude code is a still buggy mess What bugs are you seeing? I use Claude Code a lot on an Ubuntu 22.04 system and I've had very few issues with it. I'm not sure really how to quantify the amount of use; maybe "ccusage" is a good metric? That says over the last month I've used $964, and I've got 6-8 months of use on it, though only the last ~3-5 at that level. And I've got fairly wide use as well: MCP, skills, agents…
there's currently ~6k open issues and ~20k closed ones on their issue tracker ( https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues ). certainly a mix of duplicates / feature requests, but 'buggy mess' seems appropriate
you can also judge for yourself based on the changelog https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELO...
maybe we don't have AGI to prevent all bugs. but surely some of these could have been caught with some good old fashioned elbow grease and code review.
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#399Boris 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!
Really? Because the point is that when it comes to performance, just implementing your own "DOM" in C++ or some other low level language is going to have 10x the performance of electron, easily, in addition to having more features (better, smoother, file uploads would be welcome btw).
If you can put in unlimited coding engineering effort, why isn't Claude Code the very best it can possibly be?
Why isn't the fact that it can work 10% better an excuse to get claude to work on it for however long it takes?
I mean, most people here have done development with claude code, and we suppose the answer is simply: because that doesn't work without a capable engineer constantly babysitting the changes it's making, guiding it, nudging it, reminding it about edge cases, occasionally telling it it's being stupid ... it's a great product, incredible even, but it doesn't work without senior engineers.
Same question: Why doesn't it have more plugins and batch script and modfications than the app store? Surely it can by itself come up with 10000 good ideas and just implement them? Everything from little games to how to active bedroom lights by chinese vendor #123891791 ?
Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could easily maintain one in Qt but it seems they aren't even capable of that?
One thing to consider is that "native" apps are considered the gold standard of desktop UIs, but a overwhelming share of users… don’t care. I, for one, don’t necessarily enjoy Qt apps. I think the only one I still use is KeepassXC and it’s trash to me, just slightly better than Keepass2. I much prefer the Bitwarden Electron app. Given the choice, I often reach for Electron apps because they feel more feature rich, fe…
Did you ever consider that perhaps for other people when something is unreasonably slow and consuming all of their battery, the "polish" is really not that high on the list of important characteristics?
Also, keep in mind that many people would like their applications to respect their preferences, so the "polish" that looks completely out of place on their screen is ugly (besides slow).