codeinaboxClaude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native
ultimate_worrierImagine being such a slop-brainwashed fanboi that you bend over backwards to justify Claude’s objectively stupid decision to build a custom react game engine for a terminal app.
I’m not a fan of this Primeagen guy but he’s right. youtu.be/LvW1HTSLPEk
We’ve lost the Tech
Imagine being such a slop-brainwashed fanboi
Do you have any evidence for this? Looking through the post, and the author’s other blog post titles, there is very little mention of AI or Claude.
Instead of throwing labels at the author, it’s much more worthwhile to discuss their key argument about the challenges of developing native apps.
I’ll write you an essay if you’d like but from my perspective, the author’s argument is that since they are Claude, they surely know better than anyone else.
My evidence is my opinion that Electron apps are objectively worse than native apps in almost every way except for ease of building them and not having to exert the effort toward coming up with abstractions that translate the interface to many platforms at once (as any good software company does). If Claude code is so amazing, why don’t they use it to abstract their UI to deliver natively to all of the different deliverable platforms?
I think you’re misconstruing the author’s argument, at no point does the author imply that Claude knows best, or that Electron apps are better. Their closing argument is certainly not an endorsement for Electron or AI slop.
Don’t get me wrong: writing this brings me no joy. I don’t think web is a solution either. I just remember good times when native did a better-than-average job, and we were all better for using it, and it saddens me that these times have passed.
I just don’t think that kidding ourselves that the only problem with software is Electron and it all will be butterflies and unicorns once we rewrite Slack in SwiftUI is not productive. The real problem is a lack of care. And the slop; you can build it with any stack.
GammaDo you actually expect people to read past the headline? All the way to the end too, preposterous!
I actually read the article, though.
Fair point.
They also bought the Bun JS company, didn’t they? Maybe they actually can improve the spp a bit by replacing Node with Bun.
Also, which native UIs do people like coding up? Most UI toolkits have JS bindings, don’t they? So only HTML/CSS is the bad fit?
I think the argument is full code sharing with web apps. Does desktop app not use crossplatform terminal APIs, instead of JS?
Hetare KingI have no dog in this race as far as Claude is concerned, but this is pushing a false dichotomy. Not using, say, WinForms or something, because it’s too limiting or because you don’t want to make a unique UI for every platform, doesn’t have to mean strapping an entire web browser to your frontend, there are plenty of other options.
The reason frameworks like Electron are popular is that we’ve spent a long time hammering a square peg into a round hole and there are now a whole bunch of tools for designing on top of web technologies and a lot of designers with experience with those tools. And of course, the fact that code can be reused between the web app and the desktop app helps too. But it does have a performance cost. The fact that you can have poorly performing and bloated native UIs too doesn’t change that no matter how well-optimised your HTML+CSS+JS is, you can create something of the same complexity that is faster and leaner using native widgets. And when people opt for the desktop app instead of web app, they typically want something that performs better than the web app.
What alternatives are there, Tauri is basically the same thing but lighter
I mean, Qt for example?
(Reductionist take) Qt is just win forms but more modern
NostraDavidCodex is written in Rust, as it should be. It even has readline integration, so you can do ctrl-j to insert a newline! :D
edit: ah dangit, this is about the desktop app. Nevermind.
I feel like that meme works here:
You: Don’t use Claude because it’s Electron.
Me: Don’t use Claude because it is AI related.
We are not the same.