431–440 of 483 posts
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> 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.
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that is because software “engineering” does not exist, it only exist as a fairytale story and bullshit job titles like SW”E”
Right, the biggest driver of global economic growth is not based on engineering at all, and these people (who've made massive amounts of money) clearly don't know how to describe the work they do.
you should read this - all three parts, very educational (though with 30 years as “engineer” I don’t agree with it all but it is very educational, especially part 1): https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
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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, t…
If McDonald’s hamburgers taste like warmed-over shit, why are they the most popular in the world?
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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.
What does any of the malaise about discord have to do with their choice of runtime?
It is an untested hypothesis that if discord had a native app, all the problems that people complain about would disappear. I think people in hacker news like to just assert the hypothesis because sounds better than cross platform. But in this particular case, it is fundamentally untested. We simply don’t know that the app would be better if it were native.
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That won't be a problem -- again assuming the vision comes to pass -- any more than the inability to write Latin and Greek holds anyone back today.
But Greek and Latin don't underpin our entire planet's infrastructure... Software does.
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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?
They have the resources to make native UI for all six major platforms without any AI assistance at all. Maybe their dog food isn't as tasty as they want you to believe.
What are we to presume from the fact that they did not do that?
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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 co…
the central argument to the piece is still fundamentally silly. What truly do we know about the organization that produced the Claude desktop app, by virtue of the fact that they built it in electron? Really truly what do we know about them based on that decision? I submit the answer is basically nothing. Instead, we’re sort of coasting on priors and vibes about “native” tool kits being better. And that’s just catnip…
The article doesn't go as far as saying Electron is bad or judge Anthropic based on their use of it. It says Electron has downsides which are dramatically outweighed by the upsides and then shows that calculus remains true (i.e. the benefits of Electron still outweigh any of the potential downsides) even when using LLMs as coding agents. The article is not setting out to ridicule anything, it's investigating why Electron is still a good choice in the coding agent use case by looking at one such app (the Claude desktop app) written very close to home for coding agents as an example.
About the only thing the article can be said to ridicule at all is that the Claude app is slow and buggy (which is accurate IMO) but it's never saying that to imply it's impossible to solve that because it's an Electron app or that it means one should not use coding agents. The rest of the article really stands to state quite the opposite.
As the article concludes, it is a pro-Electron usage pro-coding-agent piece. I.e. that the Claude desktop app is written in Electron is NOT evidence either Claude or Electron must be bad:
> For now, Electron still makes sense. Coding agents are amazing. But the last mile of dev and the support surface area remains a real concern.
That last mile is where the author places the problems, and they had placed them there regardless whether one uses Electron or coding agents, so it's hard to take it as a hit piece for those two things.
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Why rewrite if thing exists? You can use those expensive engineers to build more stuff, not rewrite old stuff
Why not rewrite if code is free
if it gets solved, (1) we are all f....d! Not only software engineers. (2) they can rewrite it using Assembly. they == AGI
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> 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.
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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.
Anything bigger in context? Unfortunately - maybe I have bad luck… But I don’t get how they code in Anthropic when they say that almost all their new code is written by LLM. Do they have some internal much smarter model that they keep in secret and don’t sell it to customers? :)
Kepping in mind they are trying hard to sell their code assistant what else they can say?
Goal is simple: just lie your way forward to the next VC funding round.