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It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mo

It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

bopbopbop7 8mo ago
> even with the help of AI. This is what you get when you build with AI, an electron app with an input field.
- airstrike 8mo ago
  I've done way, way more than that, as I'm sure others have too. This is just bad product management.
  - bopbopbop7 8mo ago
    So where is all this amazing software that you and others built with AI? All I see is hype blog posts and pre-IPO marketing by AI companies, not much being shipped though.
    - measurablefunc 8mo ago
      There is a guy on twitter documenting his progress with moltbot/openclaw: https://x.com/Austen/status/2018371289468072219 https://x.com/Austen/status/2018371289468072219. Apparently he has already registered his bot for an LLC so he can make money w/ it.
      - bopbopbop7 8mo ago
        Some guy on Twitter selling an AI coding boot camp is an interesting example. Also it's literally just a post of him looking for a real developer to review his vibe coded bot???
        measurablefunc 8mo ago
        What does the bootcamp have to do w/ anything? He is using AI slop to make money, that's all that matters in a socio-economic system wherein everyone & everything must make profits to persist. Edit: found another example from coinbase: https://x.com/0xEricBrown/status/2018082458143699035 https://x.com/0xEricBrown/status/2018082458143699035. Edit: I'm not going to keep addressing your comment if you keep editing it. You asked for an example & I found two very easily. I am certain there are many others so at this point the onus is on you to figure out what exactly it is you are actually arguing.
        deleted 8mo ago
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        deleted 8mo ago
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        bopbopbop7 8mo ago
        Your first example is just a twitter post of a guy asking for a developer to review his vibe coded bot. Nothing shipped. The second example is twitter post of a crypto bro asking people to build something using his crypto API. Nothing shipped. Literally nothing shipped, just twitter posts of people selling a coding bootcamp and crypto.
        measurablefunc 8mo ago
        You should make a note & revisit this in a few days to figure out whether your assessment was correct or not. I've already wasted enough time here so good luck.
    - saint_fiasco 8mo ago
      You won't see it because it's mostly personal software for personal computers. I've got a medical doctor handwriting decipherer, a board game simulator that takes a PDF of the rulebooks as input and an accounting/budgeting software that can interface with my bank via email because my bank doesn't have an API. None of that is of any use to you. If you happen to need a similar software, it will be easier for you to ask your own AI to make a custom one for you rather than adapt the ones I had my AI make for me. Under the circumstances, I would feel bad shipping anything. My users would be legitimately better off just vibe coding their own versions.
      - gowld 8mo ago
        I disagree. There is a tier of people who can't vibe code what you've vibe coded, but also might not trust your app (especially the bank one). There is still a real gap here to be filled by professional work or fakers.
        saint_fiasco 8mo ago
        Professionals are doing what I am doing, only inside companies. They make custom software that solves ultra-specific problems of that one company. I don't quite understand the obsession with shipping fancy enterprise b2b saas solutions. That was the correct paradigm for back when developing custom code was expensive. Now it is cheap. Why pay for Salesforce when you only use 1% of Salesforce's features? Just vibe code the 1% of features that you actually need, plus some custom parts to handle some cursed bespoke business logic that would be a pain in the ass to do in Salesforce anyway.
        bopbopbop7 8mo ago
        Let me know when Stacy from HR vibe codes her own salesforce alternative, sounds very cool!
        saint_fiasco 8mo ago
        Supposedly Richard Stallman's secretaries knew how to code their own Emacs macros. I don't expect any LLM to empower people as much as Emacs can, but they will definitely empower more people in total, just because LLMs are easier to use than Emacs.
    - airstrike 8mo ago
      quality takes time. I'm still in stealth
  - measurablefunc 8mo ago
    Their goal is to ship as fast as possible b/c they don't care about what you care about. Their objective is to gather as much data as possible & electron is good enough for that.
    - romainhuet 8mo ago
      I work at OpenAI, and I get the concern. From our side, this was a careful tradeoff: Electron lets us iterate faster and makes it possible to bring the Codex app to Windows and Linux very soon. That doesn’t mean performance or UX don’t matter—we’re actively paying attention to both. Would genuinely love your thoughts if you try it. Early users have been surprised by how native it feels!
      - measurablefunc 8mo ago
        I use Google's antigravity so I personally have no problem w/ electron applications. At the end of the day UI performance is not a bottleneck for me.
        FridgeSeal 8mo ago
        Aaaaand that is why we, as end users get machines which are sluggish, because literally every. Single. Application is taking this attitude. Shock horror, the waste adds up, and it adds up extremely quickly.
        measurablefunc 8mo ago
        I don't really care about memory or how much of it is taken up by the editor. I have enough memory for the work that I do & UI performance would make no difference to my workflow.
      - marxisttemp 8mo ago
        Your AI can’t make a UI for 3 platforms? Seems pretty worthless.
      - 8mo ago
- hdjrudni 8mo ago
  Doesn't have to be. I just revived one of my C++ GLFW app from 2009. Codex was able to help me get it running again and added some nice new features. I guess you get an Electron app if you don't prompt it otherwise. Probably because it's learned from what all the humans are putting out there these days. That said.. unless you know better, it's going to keep happening. Even moreso when folks aren't learning the fundamentals anymore.
- babypuncher 8mo ago
  At the end of the day LLMs just reproduce the consensus of the internet, so it makes sense that a coding agent would spit out software that looks like most of what's on the internet. LLM output is called slop for a reason.
- OlympicMarmoto 8mo ago
  Claude code is perfectly capable of writing low level rendering and input code and it can be equally as mindless as vibe coding web apps. E.g. just say "write a c++ gui widget library using dx11 and win32 and copy flutters layout philosophy, use harfbuzz for shaping, etc etc"
rafram 8mo ago
- Video games often use HTML/JS-based UI these days. - UE5 has its own custom UI framework, which definitely does not feel "native" on any platform. Not really any better than Electron. - You can easily call native APIs from Electron. I agree that Electron apps that feel "web-y" or hog resources unnecessarily are distasteful, but most people don't know or care whether the apps they're running use native UI frameworks, and being able to reassign web developers to work on desktop apps is a significant selling point that will keep companies coming back to Electron instead of native.
- anonymous908213 8mo ago
  Given that OpenAI managed to single-handedly triple the price of RAM globally, people will very much care about their chat application consuming what little scraps are left over for them, even if they don't know enough about anything to know why their system is running poorly.
- harikb 8mo ago
  I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary. A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens. Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days. [1] https://wails.io/ https://wails.io/ Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!
  - alabhyajindal 8mo ago
    Wow Wails looks interesting! Hadn't heard of it before.
  - hodanli 8mo ago
    I am in love with wails. having python and JS background with no go experience. I pm'ed Ai agents to create a fairly complex desktop app for my own use. it is day and night in terms of performance compared to lightest electron app.
coldtea 8mo ago
Desktop GUI is a lost art. Gen X were the last people to master it.
- keyle 8mo ago
  I am a gen X, this hurts, but it might be true :(
pama 8mo ago
My main take is exactly the opposite. Why not build everything with a simple text interface (shell command) so the models learn to use these tools natively in pretraining. Even TUI like codex-cli or claude code are needless abstractions for such use cases and make full automation hard. You could add as many observability or input layers for humans as you want but the core should be simple calls that are saved in historical and documentation logs. [the headless/noninteractive modes come close, as do the session logs]
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  It would be cool if I didn't have to worry about whether I was "in" or "out" of the AI TUI. Right now, I need at least two terminals open: One running my shell, that I use to issue shell commands, and one running Claude, where I can't. It would be nice if it could just be my shell, and when I wanted to invoke claude, I'd just type: c Do this programming task for me. Right in the shell.
  - scottmf 8mo ago
    -p
    - ryandrake 8mo ago
      Oh wow, nice. Does it remember context from run to run?
      - scottmf 8mo ago
        Just tested and yes, but it's a little tricky so your `c` script will have to manage session IDs: 1. Start a new session and provide a random UUID: claude -p "The secret word is potato" --session-id 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000 > I see you've shared a secret word. I'll keep that in mind — the secret word is **potato**. > Is there something I can help you with today? 2. Use the -r/--resume flag with the same UUID for follow up messages: claude -p "What is the secret word?" -r 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000 > The secret word is **potato**.
namelosw 8mo ago
The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too. On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.
- harikb 8mo ago
  As I outlined in a sibling comment. You can still use React and your JS developers. Just don't ship a whole browser with your app. May be an app that is as complex as Outlook needs the pixel-perfect tweaking of every little button that they need to ship their own browser for exact version match. But everything else can use *system native browser*. Use Tauri or Wails or many other solutions like these That said, I do agree on the other comments about TUIs etc. Yes, nobody cares about the right abstractions, not even the companies that literally depend on automating these applications
  - frumplestlatz 8mo ago
    Given how much money they have, and the reach they're attempting to achieve, is it really asking too much that they hire native development teams? It's not like an application of this scale requires an army of engineers.
- OlympicMarmoto 8mo ago
  This is another common excuse. You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/ You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc
  - deleted 8mo ago
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  - incr_me 8mo ago
wilg 8mo ago
Unpopular opinion: why would you want a "native app"? On macOS, basically every app Apple makes themselves is worse in terms of design, usability, and performance than a popular Electron-based alternative. For example, I tried opening a 200MB log file in Apple's Console.app and it hung. Opened right up in VS Code.
- marxisttemp 8mo ago
  What is the superior Electron based alternative to Pixelmator Pro? Final Cut? Logic? Pages?
uxhacker 8mo ago
Why would widgets and buttons be better than a console, and or voice?
- scotty79 8mo ago
  Because you see stuff before you decide what to invoke?
- rainprincess 8mo ago
  because not everything can be describe in code, language, or speech. if you're iterating on anything that requires refinement in terms of perception, you may need real time feedback.
noonething 8mo ago
What if they kept the 'good stuff' from us? Does that seem likely here?
AstroBen 8mo ago
What features are they missing that a native app would allow for? No-one outside of a small sliver of the tech community cares if an app is built with web tech Electron also opens up easier porting to Linux which almost certainly wouldn't happen if companies insist on native only
- FridgeSeal 8mo ago
  Users care about performance and jank, it’s just that they’ve been successfully forced to shut-up-and-deal-with-it. They’re not involved in purchasing or feedback, and the people that are don’t use it enough to care, or just don’t care. Users who complain about it may as well shout into the void for how much companies take note, but hey, at least we got an ai button now! Atlassian products are a great example of this. Everyone knows Atlassian has garbage performance. Everyone complains about it. Never gets fixed though. Everyone I know could write customer complaints about its performance in every feedback box for a year, and the only thing that would happen is that we’d have wasted our own time. Users _care_ about this stuff. They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it.
  - itemize123 8mo ago
    i think you've to be more nuanced here - perf becomes important only on the extreme. i think there are compromises to be made between perf and go-to-market.
  - AstroBen 8mo ago
    I find outside of specific use cases the performance and jank are down to the developers and not whether it's native or not Obsidian is an Electron app which is pretty much universally loved. We can both give single examples
  - tokioyoyo 8mo ago
    “They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it” is a roundabout way of saying users don’t care about it enough.
autoconfig 8mo ago
> This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron. That is not correct. One of the major selling points of Electron is precisely that you can call native APIs.
herval 8mo ago
It’s just irrelevant for most users. These companies are getting more adoption than they can handle, no matter how clunky their desktop apps are. They’re optimizing for experimentation. Not performance.
- IhateAI 8mo ago
  More adoption? I don't think so... It feels to me that these models && tools are getting more verbose/consuming more tokens to compensate for a decrease in usage. I know my usage of these tools has fallen off a cliff as it become glaringly obvious they're useful in very limited scopes. I think most people start off overusing these tools, then they find the few small things that genuinely improve their workflows which tend to be isolated and small tasks. Moltbot et al, to me, seems like a psyop by these companies to get token consumption back to levels that justify the investments they need. The clock is ticking, they need more money. I'd put my money on token prices doubling to tripling over the next 12-24 months.
  - pilgrim0 8mo ago
    I suspect making the models more verbose is also a source of inflation. You’d expect an advanced model to nail down the problem succinctly, rather than spawning a swarm of agents that brute force something resembling an answer. Biggest scam ever.
  - deaux 8mo ago
    > I'd put my money on token prices doubling to tripling over the next 12-24 months. Chinese open weights models make this completely infeasible.
    - IhateAI 8mo ago
      What do weights have to do with how much it costs to run inference? Inference is heavily subsidized, the economics of it don't make any sense. Anthropic and OpenAI could open source their models and it wouldn't make it any cheaper to run those models.. You still need $500k in GPUs and a boatload of electricity to serve like 3 concurrent sessions at a decent tok/ps. There are no open source models, Chinese or otherwise that are going to be able to be run profitably and give you productivity gains comparable to a foundation model. No matter what, running LLMs is expensive and the capex required per tok/ps is only increasing, and the models are only getting more compute intensive. The hardware market literally has to crash for this to make any sense from a profitability standpoint, and I don't see that happening, therefor prices have to go up. You can't just lose billions year after year forever. None of this makes sense to me. This is simple math but everyone is literally delusional atm.
forrestthewoods 8mo ago
This is what happens when an entire generation of programmers doesn’t know how to write code in any language other than JavaScript or maybe Python. How far from grace we have fallen :sob:
rainprincess 8mo ago
I feel like it's because of the way they are internally structured. They have some people who are machine learning trained on post-training, and other people who have nice product management resumes. The post-training people want more compute, well-formatted data, honestly more ways to try whatever technique of reinforcement learning they want. The product people are building things, but OpenAI has literally been throwing stuff at the wall and it hasn't been sticking. They seem to be behind in terms of everything user interface. Canvas came after Anthropic had artifacts. Codex came after Anthropic had Claude Code. Some of their researchers (okay one) have (has) stated they believe in interface work. That's because GUIs help engage the person beyond thought, and help the person work with more complexity (perception, physics, form, 3D). But they're playing catchup, or they're trying to incubate wins in science / math.
gloosx 8mo ago
>This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron. Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic We already have three major OSes, all doing things differently. The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win. You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins just to say "it's native". If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.
- gbalduzzi 8mo ago
  It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration. You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this
  - vlovich123 8mo ago
    There are cross platform GUI toolkits out there so while I am in team web for lots of reasons, generally it’s because web apps are faster and cheaper to iterate.
    - wetpaws 8mo ago
      [dead]
    - mycall 8mo ago
      Cross platform GUIs might does have the same of support and distributed knowledge as HTML/CSS/JS. If that vendor goes away or the oss maintainers go a different direction, now you have an unsupported GUI platform.
novok 8mo ago
Devex tooling is so much better in web, you can ship much faster, and speed to market matters more than making a native app. Apple dev tooling and build speed sucks a ton in comparison, and don't get started with windows
- AltF4me 8mo ago
  This is the reason. When an app changes so often, across different platforms, you don't want to support people lagging behind on old versions. I'm not saying native is better or worse, but this will be why.
iamsaitam 8mo ago
Why should they? It's not like these apps will be around for long
- coro_1 8mo ago
  The brief video OpenAI did sets the stage as I see it - for an evolving kind of engineer. Who will think and design as much as know code.
72deluxe 8mo ago
I used wxWidgets to build a native GUI for Windows + Mac 10+ years ago and implemented all GUI-drawing (it was an audio signal processor control software so included meters, faders, knobs, audio spectrum and I even incorporated Horde3D OpenGL interface for visualising an arena [sadly never fully finished to full potential as my modelling abilities in Blender simply wasn't good enough]). I wrote that, and another guy wrote the network library in C that sent signals to the network devices, and received them. I responded to the incoming network info to draw appropriate parts of the UI like meters/scopes at 50ms minimum. The fact that we did this as a 1-man team for the GUI and that I can still compile it today (if I had the code) against wxWidgets, to then run on macOS and Windows simply shows the lazy nature of (most/all?) desktop apps by big companies these days. I utterly detest using them, but it seems customers think an app that takes 5 seconds to launch with a spinning whirly wheel and horizontal gradient animation over list views for 5+ seconds before content is loaded is perfectly acceptable. Quality with a capital K!
suyash 8mo ago
Stating Unity, Unreal Engine and Blender as good examples of UI is a joke in itself, can't take comment seriously after that.
fHr 8mo ago
CLI > all Don't be a application peasant
pplonski86 8mo ago
It is not that easy to build such app from scratch ... it all requires a lot of work, even with AI help. I think the most important is to provide easy to use UI first, and if speed or some missing features will be blockers for further innovation step then maybe native app will be at some point created.
zaptheimpaler 8mo ago
Is there any actual problem you have with the application? If not, who cares? Is this the 10 year old Electron is slow and bad meme being trotted out again?
sheepscreek 8mo ago
It’s less that and more - we’re still figuring out the best interface to use them. For coding, interacting with the agent is best done via chat, especially if you’re trying to run teams of agents, then you’re not going to be looking at code all the time. The agent will summarize the changes, you will click on the diffs, approve them and move on. So it’s a very different experience from being the only one coding. Edit: Here’s a hot take - A quick note on SwiftUI, it’s a piece of garbage that’s so hard to use that native devs despise it. So far no AI has been able to one shot it for me. Blender most likely uses immediate mode - which is more resource intensive and less efficient than a stateful object oriented interface. But Zed uses a similar approach with (I think) success. Then think about this, pre-AI, Google with all its billions, used web interfaces in all its desktop product GUIs :) Apple, with all of its billions, created XCode which is inferior to every other IDE I have ever used. They still haven’t learned from Visual Studio. Microsoft is bad at a lot of things but developer tooling isn’t one of them. All that to say, even if you knew what you wanted, taking that vision to reality is a difficult challenge. At least with AI, they could create a 100 different prototypes cheaply and pick the best direction based on that. That they should do, and they probably aren’t.
auggierose 8mo ago
Despite being an Electron app, it doesn't work on Intel macs...
- miscend 8mo ago
  You can try this script, it should work https://github.com/Miscend/codex-rebuilder https://github.com/Miscend/codex-rebuilder
adam_patarino 8mo ago
AI has more training on web apps I think the real answer is that these guys are told they need to ship in 2 months and have a huge team of web devs
827a 8mo ago
It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.
- barumrho 8mo ago
  Apple Music isn't native either.
  - 827a 8mo ago
    Oh right, I forgot, "native" just means "good". So if an app is bad, it can't be native, and if an electron app is actually good its because they're doing crazy optimizations that aren't feasible for mortal souls so don't even think about it. This is the "Hackers News Law of Application Nativeness".
capl 8mo ago
LLMs are trained on web slop, not engineering
k__ 8mo ago
Anthropic bought Bun and it's creator relentlessly optimizes Claude Code now. So, there seems to be light.
LucasBrandt 8mo ago
It's amazing to me that in the official Gemini app on Android, the hamburger menu on the left does not open on swipe - only if you click the hamburger button. A basic native UI interaction in the home screen of one of Google's flagship apps.
waldopat 8mo ago
Just jumping on the thread. I think the conversation is conflating two very different things: 1. Turing test UX's, where a chat app is the product and the feature (Electron is fine) 2. The class of things LLMs are good at that often do not need a UI, let alone a chat app, and need automation glue (Electron may cause friction) Personally, I feel like we're jumping on capabilities and missing a much larger issue of permissioning and security. In an API or MCP context, permissions may be scoped via tokens at the very least, but within an OS context, that boundary is not necessarily present. Once an agent can read and write files or executed commands as the logged in user, there's a level of trust and access that goes against most best practices. This is probably a startup to be hatched, but it seems to me this space of getting agents to be scoped properly and stay in bounds, just like cursor has rules, would be a prereq before giving access to an OS at all.
okchildhood 8mo ago
[dead]
firemelt 8mo ago
use to have thoughts like that until I realize, electron help the cross platform and its really polished
ycowmgktk 8mo ago
[dead]

bopbopbop7 8mo ago

> even with the help of AI. This is what you get when you build with AI, an electron app with an input field.

airstrike 8mo ago
I've done way, way more than that, as I'm sure others have too. This is just bad product management.
- bopbopbop7 8mo ago
  So where is all this amazing software that you and others built with AI? All I see is hype blog posts and pre-IPO marketing by AI companies, not much being shipped though.
  - measurablefunc 8mo ago
    There is a guy on twitter documenting his progress with moltbot/openclaw: https://x.com/Austen/status/2018371289468072219 https://x.com/Austen/status/2018371289468072219. Apparently he has already registered his bot for an LLC so he can make money w/ it.
    - bopbopbop7 8mo ago
      Some guy on Twitter selling an AI coding boot camp is an interesting example. Also it's literally just a post of him looking for a real developer to review his vibe coded bot???
      - measurablefunc 8mo ago
        What does the bootcamp have to do w/ anything? He is using AI slop to make money, that's all that matters in a socio-economic system wherein everyone & everything must make profits to persist. Edit: found another example from coinbase: https://x.com/0xEricBrown/status/2018082458143699035 https://x.com/0xEricBrown/status/2018082458143699035. Edit: I'm not going to keep addressing your comment if you keep editing it. You asked for an example & I found two very easily. I am certain there are many others so at this point the onus is on you to figure out what exactly it is you are actually arguing.
        deleted 8mo ago
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        bopbopbop7 8mo ago
        Your first example is just a twitter post of a guy asking for a developer to review his vibe coded bot. Nothing shipped. The second example is twitter post of a crypto bro asking people to build something using his crypto API. Nothing shipped. Literally nothing shipped, just twitter posts of people selling a coding bootcamp and crypto.
        measurablefunc 8mo ago
        You should make a note & revisit this in a few days to figure out whether your assessment was correct or not. I've already wasted enough time here so good luck.
  - saint_fiasco 8mo ago
    You won't see it because it's mostly personal software for personal computers. I've got a medical doctor handwriting decipherer, a board game simulator that takes a PDF of the rulebooks as input and an accounting/budgeting software that can interface with my bank via email because my bank doesn't have an API. None of that is of any use to you. If you happen to need a similar software, it will be easier for you to ask your own AI to make a custom one for you rather than adapt the ones I had my AI make for me. Under the circumstances, I would feel bad shipping anything. My users would be legitimately better off just vibe coding their own versions.
    - gowld 8mo ago
      I disagree. There is a tier of people who can't vibe code what you've vibe coded, but also might not trust your app (especially the bank one). There is still a real gap here to be filled by professional work or fakers.
      - saint_fiasco 8mo ago
        Professionals are doing what I am doing, only inside companies. They make custom software that solves ultra-specific problems of that one company. I don't quite understand the obsession with shipping fancy enterprise b2b saas solutions. That was the correct paradigm for back when developing custom code was expensive. Now it is cheap. Why pay for Salesforce when you only use 1% of Salesforce's features? Just vibe code the 1% of features that you actually need, plus some custom parts to handle some cursed bespoke business logic that would be a pain in the ass to do in Salesforce anyway.
        bopbopbop7 8mo ago
        Let me know when Stacy from HR vibe codes her own salesforce alternative, sounds very cool!
        saint_fiasco 8mo ago
        Supposedly Richard Stallman's secretaries knew how to code their own Emacs macros. I don't expect any LLM to empower people as much as Emacs can, but they will definitely empower more people in total, just because LLMs are easier to use than Emacs.
  - airstrike 8mo ago
    quality takes time. I'm still in stealth
- measurablefunc 8mo ago
  Their goal is to ship as fast as possible b/c they don't care about what you care about. Their objective is to gather as much data as possible & electron is good enough for that.
  - romainhuet 8mo ago
    I work at OpenAI, and I get the concern. From our side, this was a careful tradeoff: Electron lets us iterate faster and makes it possible to bring the Codex app to Windows and Linux very soon. That doesn’t mean performance or UX don’t matter—we’re actively paying attention to both. Would genuinely love your thoughts if you try it. Early users have been surprised by how native it feels!
    - measurablefunc 8mo ago
      I use Google's antigravity so I personally have no problem w/ electron applications. At the end of the day UI performance is not a bottleneck for me.
      - FridgeSeal 8mo ago
        Aaaaand that is why we, as end users get machines which are sluggish, because literally every. Single. Application is taking this attitude. Shock horror, the waste adds up, and it adds up extremely quickly.
        measurablefunc 8mo ago
        I don't really care about memory or how much of it is taken up by the editor. I have enough memory for the work that I do & UI performance would make no difference to my workflow.
    - marxisttemp 8mo ago
      Your AI can’t make a UI for 3 platforms? Seems pretty worthless.
    - 8mo ago
hdjrudni 8mo ago
Doesn't have to be. I just revived one of my C++ GLFW app from 2009. Codex was able to help me get it running again and added some nice new features. I guess you get an Electron app if you don't prompt it otherwise. Probably because it's learned from what all the humans are putting out there these days. That said.. unless you know better, it's going to keep happening. Even moreso when folks aren't learning the fundamentals anymore.
babypuncher 8mo ago
At the end of the day LLMs just reproduce the consensus of the internet, so it makes sense that a coding agent would spit out software that looks like most of what's on the internet. LLM output is called slop for a reason.
OlympicMarmoto 8mo ago
Claude code is perfectly capable of writing low level rendering and input code and it can be equally as mindless as vibe coding web apps. E.g. just say "write a c++ gui widget library using dx11 and win32 and copy flutters layout philosophy, use harfbuzz for shaping, etc etc"

rafram 8mo ago

- Video games often use HTML/JS-based UI these days. - UE5 has its own custom UI framework, which definitely does not feel "native" on any platform. Not really any better than Electron. - You can easily call native APIs from Electron. I agree that Electron apps that feel "web-y" or hog resources unnecessarily are distasteful, but most people don't know or care whether the apps they're running use native UI frameworks, and being able to reassign web developers to work on desktop apps is a significant selling point that will keep companies coming back to Electron instead of native.

anonymous908213 8mo ago
Given that OpenAI managed to single-handedly triple the price of RAM globally, people will very much care about their chat application consuming what little scraps are left over for them, even if they don't know enough about anything to know why their system is running poorly.
harikb 8mo ago
I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary. A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens. Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days. [1] https://wails.io/ https://wails.io/ Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!
- alabhyajindal 8mo ago
  Wow Wails looks interesting! Hadn't heard of it before.
- hodanli 8mo ago
  I am in love with wails. having python and JS background with no go experience. I pm'ed Ai agents to create a fairly complex desktop app for my own use. it is day and night in terms of performance compared to lightest electron app.

coldtea 8mo ago

Desktop GUI is a lost art. Gen X were the last people to master it.

keyle 8mo ago
I am a gen X, this hurts, but it might be true :(

pama 8mo ago

My main take is exactly the opposite. Why not build everything with a simple text interface (shell command) so the models learn to use these tools natively in pretraining. Even TUI like codex-cli or claude code are needless abstractions for such use cases and make full automation hard. You could add as many observability or input layers for humans as you want but the core should be simple calls that are saved in historical and documentation logs. [the headless/noninteractive modes come close, as do the session logs]

ryandrake 8mo ago
It would be cool if I didn't have to worry about whether I was "in" or "out" of the AI TUI. Right now, I need at least two terminals open: One running my shell, that I use to issue shell commands, and one running Claude, where I can't. It would be nice if it could just be my shell, and when I wanted to invoke claude, I'd just type: c Do this programming task for me. Right in the shell.
- scottmf 8mo ago
  -p
  - ryandrake 8mo ago
    Oh wow, nice. Does it remember context from run to run?
    - scottmf 8mo ago
      Just tested and yes, but it's a little tricky so your `c` script will have to manage session IDs: 1. Start a new session and provide a random UUID: claude -p "The secret word is potato" --session-id 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000 > I see you've shared a secret word. I'll keep that in mind — the secret word is **potato**. > Is there something I can help you with today? 2. Use the -r/--resume flag with the same UUID for follow up messages: claude -p "What is the secret word?" -r 550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000 > The secret word is **potato**.

namelosw 8mo ago

The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too. On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.

harikb 8mo ago
As I outlined in a sibling comment. You can still use React and your JS developers. Just don't ship a whole browser with your app. May be an app that is as complex as Outlook needs the pixel-perfect tweaking of every little button that they need to ship their own browser for exact version match. But everything else can use *system native browser*. Use Tauri or Wails or many other solutions like these That said, I do agree on the other comments about TUIs etc. Yes, nobody cares about the right abstractions, not even the companies that literally depend on automating these applications
- frumplestlatz 8mo ago
  Given how much money they have, and the reach they're attempting to achieve, is it really asking too much that they hire native development teams? It's not like an application of this scale requires an army of engineers.
OlympicMarmoto 8mo ago
This is another common excuse. You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/ https://filepilot.tech/ You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- incr_me 8mo ago

wilg 8mo ago

Unpopular opinion: why would you want a "native app"? On macOS, basically every app Apple makes themselves is worse in terms of design, usability, and performance than a popular Electron-based alternative. For example, I tried opening a 200MB log file in Apple's Console.app and it hung. Opened right up in VS Code.

marxisttemp 8mo ago
What is the superior Electron based alternative to Pixelmator Pro? Final Cut? Logic? Pages?

uxhacker 8mo ago

Why would widgets and buttons be better than a console, and or voice?

scotty79 8mo ago
Because you see stuff before you decide what to invoke?
rainprincess 8mo ago
because not everything can be describe in code, language, or speech. if you're iterating on anything that requires refinement in terms of perception, you may need real time feedback.

noonething 8mo ago

What if they kept the 'good stuff' from us? Does that seem likely here?

AstroBen 8mo ago

What features are they missing that a native app would allow for? No-one outside of a small sliver of the tech community cares if an app is built with web tech Electron also opens up easier porting to Linux which almost certainly wouldn't happen if companies insist on native only

FridgeSeal 8mo ago
Users care about performance and jank, it’s just that they’ve been successfully forced to shut-up-and-deal-with-it. They’re not involved in purchasing or feedback, and the people that are don’t use it enough to care, or just don’t care. Users who complain about it may as well shout into the void for how much companies take note, but hey, at least we got an ai button now! Atlassian products are a great example of this. Everyone knows Atlassian has garbage performance. Everyone complains about it. Never gets fixed though. Everyone I know could write customer complaints about its performance in every feedback box for a year, and the only thing that would happen is that we’d have wasted our own time. Users _care_ about this stuff. They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it.
- itemize123 8mo ago
  i think you've to be more nuanced here - perf becomes important only on the extreme. i think there are compromises to be made between perf and go-to-market.
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  I find outside of specific use cases the performance and jank are down to the developers and not whether it's native or not Obsidian is an Electron app which is pretty much universally loved. We can both give single examples
- tokioyoyo 8mo ago
  “They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it” is a roundabout way of saying users don’t care about it enough.

autoconfig 8mo ago

> This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron. That is not correct. One of the major selling points of Electron is precisely that you can call native APIs.

herval 8mo ago

It’s just irrelevant for most users. These companies are getting more adoption than they can handle, no matter how clunky their desktop apps are. They’re optimizing for experimentation. Not performance.

IhateAI 8mo ago
More adoption? I don't think so... It feels to me that these models && tools are getting more verbose/consuming more tokens to compensate for a decrease in usage. I know my usage of these tools has fallen off a cliff as it become glaringly obvious they're useful in very limited scopes. I think most people start off overusing these tools, then they find the few small things that genuinely improve their workflows which tend to be isolated and small tasks. Moltbot et al, to me, seems like a psyop by these companies to get token consumption back to levels that justify the investments they need. The clock is ticking, they need more money. I'd put my money on token prices doubling to tripling over the next 12-24 months.
- pilgrim0 8mo ago
  I suspect making the models more verbose is also a source of inflation. You’d expect an advanced model to nail down the problem succinctly, rather than spawning a swarm of agents that brute force something resembling an answer. Biggest scam ever.
- deaux 8mo ago
  > I'd put my money on token prices doubling to tripling over the next 12-24 months. Chinese open weights models make this completely infeasible.
  - IhateAI 8mo ago
    What do weights have to do with how much it costs to run inference? Inference is heavily subsidized, the economics of it don't make any sense. Anthropic and OpenAI could open source their models and it wouldn't make it any cheaper to run those models.. You still need $500k in GPUs and a boatload of electricity to serve like 3 concurrent sessions at a decent tok/ps. There are no open source models, Chinese or otherwise that are going to be able to be run profitably and give you productivity gains comparable to a foundation model. No matter what, running LLMs is expensive and the capex required per tok/ps is only increasing, and the models are only getting more compute intensive. The hardware market literally has to crash for this to make any sense from a profitability standpoint, and I don't see that happening, therefor prices have to go up. You can't just lose billions year after year forever. None of this makes sense to me. This is simple math but everyone is literally delusional atm.

forrestthewoods 8mo ago

This is what happens when an entire generation of programmers doesn’t know how to write code in any language other than JavaScript or maybe Python. How far from grace we have fallen :sob:

rainprincess 8mo ago

I feel like it's because of the way they are internally structured. They have some people who are machine learning trained on post-training, and other people who have nice product management resumes. The post-training people want more compute, well-formatted data, honestly more ways to try whatever technique of reinforcement learning they want. The product people are building things, but OpenAI has literally been throwing stuff at the wall and it hasn't been sticking. They seem to be behind in terms of everything user interface. Canvas came after Anthropic had artifacts. Codex came after Anthropic had Claude Code. Some of their researchers (okay one) have (has) stated they believe in interface work. That's because GUIs help engage the person beyond thought, and help the person work with more complexity (perception, physics, form, 3D). But they're playing catchup, or they're trying to incubate wins in science / math.

gloosx 8mo ago

>This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron. Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic We already have three major OSes, all doing things differently. The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win. You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins just to say "it's native". If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.

gbalduzzi 8mo ago
It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration. You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this
- vlovich123 8mo ago
  There are cross platform GUI toolkits out there so while I am in team web for lots of reasons, generally it’s because web apps are faster and cheaper to iterate.
  - wetpaws 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - mycall 8mo ago
    Cross platform GUIs might does have the same of support and distributed knowledge as HTML/CSS/JS. If that vendor goes away or the oss maintainers go a different direction, now you have an unsupported GUI platform.

novok 8mo ago

Devex tooling is so much better in web, you can ship much faster, and speed to market matters more than making a native app. Apple dev tooling and build speed sucks a ton in comparison, and don't get started with windows

AltF4me 8mo ago
This is the reason. When an app changes so often, across different platforms, you don't want to support people lagging behind on old versions. I'm not saying native is better or worse, but this will be why.

iamsaitam 8mo ago

Why should they? It's not like these apps will be around for long

coro_1 8mo ago
The brief video OpenAI did sets the stage as I see it - for an evolving kind of engineer. Who will think and design as much as know code.

72deluxe 8mo ago

I used wxWidgets to build a native GUI for Windows + Mac 10+ years ago and implemented all GUI-drawing (it was an audio signal processor control software so included meters, faders, knobs, audio spectrum and I even incorporated Horde3D OpenGL interface for visualising an arena [sadly never fully finished to full potential as my modelling abilities in Blender simply wasn't good enough]). I wrote that, and another guy wrote the network library in C that sent signals to the network devices, and received them. I responded to the incoming network info to draw appropriate parts of the UI like meters/scopes at 50ms minimum. The fact that we did this as a 1-man team for the GUI and that I can still compile it today (if I had the code) against wxWidgets, to then run on macOS and Windows simply shows the lazy nature of (most/all?) desktop apps by big companies these days. I utterly detest using them, but it seems customers think an app that takes 5 seconds to launch with a spinning whirly wheel and horizontal gradient animation over list views for 5+ seconds before content is loaded is perfectly acceptable. Quality with a capital K!

suyash 8mo ago

Stating Unity, Unreal Engine and Blender as good examples of UI is a joke in itself, can't take comment seriously after that.

fHr 8mo ago

CLI > all Don't be a application peasant

pplonski86 8mo ago

It is not that easy to build such app from scratch ... it all requires a lot of work, even with AI help. I think the most important is to provide easy to use UI first, and if speed or some missing features will be blockers for further innovation step then maybe native app will be at some point created.

zaptheimpaler 8mo ago

Is there any actual problem you have with the application? If not, who cares? Is this the 10 year old Electron is slow and bad meme being trotted out again?

sheepscreek 8mo ago

It’s less that and more - we’re still figuring out the best interface to use them. For coding, interacting with the agent is best done via chat, especially if you’re trying to run teams of agents, then you’re not going to be looking at code all the time. The agent will summarize the changes, you will click on the diffs, approve them and move on. So it’s a very different experience from being the only one coding. Edit: Here’s a hot take - A quick note on SwiftUI, it’s a piece of garbage that’s so hard to use that native devs despise it. So far no AI has been able to one shot it for me. Blender most likely uses immediate mode - which is more resource intensive and less efficient than a stateful object oriented interface. But Zed uses a similar approach with (I think) success. Then think about this, pre-AI, Google with all its billions, used web interfaces in all its desktop product GUIs :) Apple, with all of its billions, created XCode which is inferior to every other IDE I have ever used. They still haven’t learned from Visual Studio. Microsoft is bad at a lot of things but developer tooling isn’t one of them. All that to say, even if you knew what you wanted, taking that vision to reality is a difficult challenge. At least with AI, they could create a 100 different prototypes cheaply and pick the best direction based on that. That they should do, and they probably aren’t.

auggierose 8mo ago

Despite being an Electron app, it doesn't work on Intel macs...

miscend 8mo ago
You can try this script, it should work https://github.com/Miscend/codex-rebuilder https://github.com/Miscend/codex-rebuilder

adam_patarino 8mo ago

AI has more training on web apps I think the real answer is that these guys are told they need to ship in 2 months and have a huge team of web devs

827a 8mo ago

It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.

barumrho 8mo ago
Apple Music isn't native either.
- 827a 8mo ago
  Oh right, I forgot, "native" just means "good". So if an app is bad, it can't be native, and if an electron app is actually good its because they're doing crazy optimizations that aren't feasible for mortal souls so don't even think about it. This is the "Hackers News Law of Application Nativeness".

capl 8mo ago

LLMs are trained on web slop, not engineering

k__ 8mo ago

Anthropic bought Bun and it's creator relentlessly optimizes Claude Code now. So, there seems to be light.

LucasBrandt 8mo ago

It's amazing to me that in the official Gemini app on Android, the hamburger menu on the left does not open on swipe - only if you click the hamburger button. A basic native UI interaction in the home screen of one of Google's flagship apps.

waldopat 8mo ago

Just jumping on the thread. I think the conversation is conflating two very different things: 1. Turing test UX's, where a chat app is the product and the feature (Electron is fine) 2. The class of things LLMs are good at that often do not need a UI, let alone a chat app, and need automation glue (Electron may cause friction) Personally, I feel like we're jumping on capabilities and missing a much larger issue of permissioning and security. In an API or MCP context, permissions may be scoped via tokens at the very least, but within an OS context, that boundary is not necessarily present. Once an agent can read and write files or executed commands as the logged in user, there's a level of trust and access that goes against most best practices. This is probably a startup to be hatched, but it seems to me this space of getting agents to be scoped properly and stay in bounds, just like cursor has rules, would be a prereq before giving access to an OS at all.

okchildhood 8mo ago

[dead]

firemelt 8mo ago

use to have thoughts like that until I realize, electron help the cross platform and its really polished

ycowmgktk 8mo ago

[dead]