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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#401

Post by thiht »

LtWorf wrote: post #400
thiht wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ok but did you consider some people care about polish and prefer apps with an attention to design, and not so much about consistency with other apps? Why are your tastes more important?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#402

Post by bsaul »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #281
reitzensteinm wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

God the number of ghastly survival crafting LLM slop games that are gonna appear on steam 6 months from now...

all stores in general are going to suffer. There needs to be a new model.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#403

Post by Voultapher »

aembleton wrote: post #381
dmix wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, I understand why let's release this one feature everywhere is a great lure and I do get annoyed when desktop vs mobile spotify gets features later or never. However, a phone is not a desktop capability wise and what we usually get is the power of the phone on a desktop, aka the lowest common denominator of capabilities.

This fetish we as an industry have to hide platform specifics makes us blind to the platform specific capabilities. Some software would be better off if it leaned into the differences instead of fighting them.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#404

Post by Voultapher »

collinvandyck76 wrote: post #118
reconnecting wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And after 12 months, most probably no one from your team will understand what the result of half of those bugs is. When devs outsource their thinking to AI, they lose the mental map, and without it, control over the entire system.

I think about this a lot, and do everything I can to avoid having Claude write production code while keeping the expected tempo up. To date, this has mostly ended up having me use it to write project plans, generate walkthroughs, and write unit and integration tests. The terrifying scenario for me is getting paged and then not being able to actually reason about what is happening.

I find that writing good tests is my ticket to understanding the problem in depth, be careful about outsourcing that part. Plus from what I have seen LLM generated tests are often low quality.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#405

Post by LtWorf »

thiht wrote: post #401
LtWorf wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ok but did you consider some people care about polish and prefer apps with an attention to design, and not so much about consistency with other apps? Why are your tastes more important?

Not my taste, the requirements of not crashing and not being horribly slow come before any polish. Any software engineering course will teach you that.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#406

Post by macintux »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #139
macintux wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely true for me. What’s particularly problematic is code I need to review but can’t effectively test due to environmental challenges.

Thats a tough situation. How do you handle the testing with human code?

Just as poorly.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#407

Post by runlevel1 »

blibble wrote: post #168
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!

this is you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw if that's the case, why don't you just ask it to "make it not shit"?

I'm not sure what's more insane: That they're willing to make those claims or that companies are willing to downsize based on them.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#408

Post by sarchertech »

selridge wrote: post #369
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?

APP BAD! If coding SOLVED HOW COME APP BAD.

I mean if your coding machine can’t solve known issues with your app then coding isn’t solved is it.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#409

Post by ajross »

pjmlp wrote: post #382
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…

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.

> Electron crap application

Sigh. Beyond the deeply unserious hyperbole, this is a no-true-scotsman. Yes, you can use native APIs in Electron. They can even help. That's not remotely an argument for not using Electron.

> the in-editor terminal makes use of WebGL

Right, because clearly the Electron-provided browser environment was insufficient and needed to be escaped by using... a browser API instead?

Again, folks, the argument here is from existence. If the browser stack is insufficient for developing UIs in the modern world, then why is it winning so terrifyingly?

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#410

Post by ajross »

xigoi wrote: post #386
ajross wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Thunderbird is a fully-featured mail app and much more performant than Gmail.

TB is great and I use it every day. An argument for it from a performance standpoint is ridiculous on its face. Put 10G of mail in the Inbox and come back to me with measurements. GMail laughs at mere gigabytes.

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