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Why is Claude an Electron app?

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Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#441

Post by selridge »

zamadatix wrote: post #437
selridge wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's silly we have to judge what the article is saying by how it's argued in the HN comments, especially on something divisive where many comments react to the conclusions they made when they saw the title. 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 calc…

I mean the article is pretty short. And what it implies presents itself in the subtitle! It opens with a "fact" (a link to the author's own tweet) which says:

"The state of coding agents can be summed up by this anecdote:

Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app."

We haven't made it 100 words in and we already have the core claim. In case we missed it, the author puts it in an inset later:

>So why are we still using Electron and not embracing the agent-powered, spec driven development future?

We get to the end where the author says:

"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's both true and and misleading. It's misleading because we can all agree with this sober-minded concluding statement and forget it's just based on "Electron bad, native good". The real logical sequence the author needs us to follow is:

Anthropic said code is free now. > Native code is harder than that for a cross platform runtime > Anthropic releases an app on a cross-platform runtime > code must not be free.

That is only true iff there's absolutely no other design tradeoff! Did they pick electron because robots are bad at the last mile? Maybe. It's pretty dubious, given the MANY MANY other people who made electron apps before AI could code. It's also not at all clear "native good, electron bad" is true at all. It reminds me STRONGLY of "jQuery bad / native good" which was also groundless.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#442

Post by sarchertech »

selridge wrote: post #426
sarchertech wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If artificial intelligence exceeded the ability of hacker news users to bitch about software, that would truly be AGI.

I guess you can complain about HN users complaining about software if you want to. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are objective flaws with this particularly piece of software that shouldn’t exist if the company building it has truly “solved code”.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#443

Post by zamadatix »

selridge wrote: post #441
zamadatix wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's silly we have to judge what the article is saying by how it's argued in the HN comments, especially on something divisive where many comments react to the conclusions they made when they saw the title. 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 calc…

I mean the article is pretty short. And what it implies presents itself in the subtitle! It opens with a "fact" (a link to the author's own tweet) which says: "The state of coding agents can be summed up by this anecdote: Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app." We haven't made it 100 words in and we already have the core claim. In case we…

I think we see that opening from very different perspectives. You see it as "this kind of statement must only mean they wish to attack these things with it, as that's the only conclusion I would make from the statement" whereas I see it as "this statement grabs the reader's attention to make them read through on why the author likely sees it differently than the reader would assume one normally expect from that". It is relatively short. I don't see that as a crime though, particularly for the latter style posting you don't want to lose most of the audience before the end.

I.e. yes, coding agents can't make everyone happy and do 100% of everything - but by the end the opposite of the expected point from that is reasoned. It may not be exhaustive, but that does not automatically mean the sole point is reductionist. It only takes one counterexample of reasoning to show a point invalid, so if you don't assume the goal is to make Electron and Claude actually sound bad then these points are not really problematic.

As someone who sees themselves more towards the center of the AI debate I found the article surprisingly refreshing in not trying to argue absolutes about extremes. Others who sit more towards the extremes probably see it as an attack piece (regardless of which extreme) just because it doesn't go as far as they'd like in each regard.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#444

Post by simjnd »

docmars wrote: post #312
xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm already dreading it. Steam was already full of junk being released by the dozens every single day. It's hard to think it could be worse.

I also think Steam does a great job a hiding it, and the new recommendation page is really great IMO. Other than some generic AAA, it introduced me to really great games I enjoyed based on my play history.

The more content is available, the more curation is important and IMO their algorithm currently does a good job at it.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#445

Post by hedgehog »

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…

I'm not sure what you're responding to. What I'm describing is my actual experience using Claude, and what I'm hoping for is that they'll spend something like two engineers for a quarter making the app more pleasant to use.

Setting that aside, I think you learned the wrong lesson here. There's no fight. Performance comes from app architecture engineering more than the underlying tools. Building on the trash fire that is the current JS ecosystem may make it harder, true, but apps like VS Code, Discord, Slack, etc show that with enough effort a team can use those tools to deliver something with relatively much better performance. The underlying browser engines are quite sophisticated and very efficient for what they are asked to do, it's just a question of good engineering on top of that. Based on the observable behavior I'm guessing the Claude app is doing something like triggering reflow for the entire chat thread every time they append a few characters to the chat. Totally avoidable.

The big reason web tech is ubiquitous is it has the best properties for distribution. That may last a little while or a long time, but there is no fundamental reason why it's more durable than say Win32 and MFC.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#446

Post by selridge »

zamadatix wrote: post #443
selridge wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the article is pretty short. And what it implies presents itself in the subtitle! It opens with a "fact" (a link to the author's own tweet) which says: "The state of coding agents can be summed up by this anecdote: Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app." We haven't made it 100 words in and we already have the core claim. In case we…

I think we see that opening from very different perspectives. You see it as "this kind of statement must only mean they wish to attack these things with it, as that's the only conclusion I would make from the statement" whereas I see it as "this statement grabs the reader's attention to make them read through on why the author likely sees it differently than the reader would assume one normally expect from that". It…

It's just a category of an error of a piece.

You can't conclude anything reliably from their choice of electron over native apps. You can't. You can ASSERT things like the author does, like "The state of coding agents can be summed up by this fact: Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app." That's a fine assertion. It's just not a fact or knowledge about any kind of design decision.

The whole argument revolves around knowing that electron is a compromise because one could just make multiple native apps without asking if "make multiple native apps" serves a design need the developers had at all! If the developers (like many others who use electron) did not declare "we want to make native apps" or have a need that caused that to become a desire, then inferring that using electron is a compromise at all is groundless. It may never have been a compromise to begin with!

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#447

Post by danny_codes »

condiment wrote: post #62

Maybe code is free, but code isn't all that goes into building software. Minimally, you have design, code, integrate, test, document, launch. Claude is going to help mostly with code, much less with design. It might help to accelerate integration, if the application is simple enough and the environment is good enough. The fact is, going cross-platform native trebles effort in areas that Claude does not yet have a use…

That's just a harness diff. A few more iterations of bootstrapping and the harness will be able to do the whole lifecycle.

The disturbing fact is that AI is simply smarter than us by a stupendous margin. Anything you do that involves thinking can be done better by the AI. We are obsolete when it comes to being smart.

I was in denial about this for a couple years, but I understand now.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#448

Post by danny_codes »

harel wrote: post #323
CamperBob2 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that by the time those trillions of lines of code start to cause maintenance problems, the models will be good enough to deal with those problems. We'll see, I guess...

That won't solve the problem that humans will lose the skill to write code. It will become a hobbyist pass time. Like people listening to 8-tracks now...

Why is that a problem?

Sewing by hand is mostly a hobby but it doesn't seem to be a problem for the textile industry. Planting seeds by hand in a field is a hobby too. So is cutting down trees with an ax.

It sucks but our skill set is (or will soon be) worthless. If it's a consolation, the same is true for anyone who makes money with their brain.

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#449

Post by solarkraft »

bigtex wrote: post #393
solarkraft wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Make no mistakes"

Re: Why is Claude an Electron app?

#450

Post by PacificSpecific »

selridge wrote: post #434
PacificSpecific wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 this have to do with choosing an electron app over a native app? 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…

That was only 1/3 of the electron applications which you hyper fixated on. If I use 10 applications a day and the 3 of them I (and countless other people) consistently have a problem with share something in common. Well, I'll let you figured that one out on your own.

I just saw your other posts in this thread though.

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