Article argues that Claude is not an Electron app not because LLMs can’t do it, but because there are no advantages left for native

API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform.

  • codeinabox@programming.devOPEnglish
    43·
    20 hours ago

    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.

    • ultimate_worrier@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      51·
      18 hours ago

      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? Let’s blame the native platforms when OTHER SOFTWARE EXISTS THAT ALREADY MANAGES TO DO THIS.

      And yet another reason Anthropic chose this stack is ABSOLUTELY because they had more training data for React, Electron apps, and Typescript than any other language. To me, it sounds like they were actually forced to use the worst possible solution here because it is the only stack that had enough training data for them as they scraped all of the code on the Internet that they could find.

      • Life is Tetris@leminal.space
        3·
        16 hours ago

        They also bought the Bun JS company, didn’t they? Maybe they actually can improve the spp a bit by replacing Node with Bun.

      • codeinabox@programming.devOPEnglish
        3·
        16 hours ago

        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.

      • Life is Tetris@leminal.space
        11·
        16 hours ago

        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?