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Why is Claude an Electron app?

428 points by dbreunig 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago
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CTDOCodebases 8mo ago
Because when a service is running at a loss the investors want their money to be spent efficiently.
mihaela 8mo ago
Exactly. Shameful explanation.
BoredPositron 8mo ago
Yawn the 90/10 excuse again and 'Shipping it everywhere' is a blatant lie there is still no Linux release. Looks like you are talking about Claude Code as Claude. Claude would be the Desktop app...
- Vaslo 8mo ago
  Because it’s an Electron app, I use on Omarchy Linux with no problem
  - BoredPositron 8mo ago
    There is no official release and some features don't work if you patch it to work on Linux.
the__alchemist 8mo ago
Or: Why can't I log in to Claude on my laptop? It opens a browser with an indefinite spinner, and when I click "Login" on the website, it forwards me to register instead. Not really selling it as the future of coding if their fundamentals are this screwed up!
jsiepkes 8mo ago
That, and the IntellIJ plugin of Claude is basically the Claude CLI running in a terminal. Also pretty underwhelming.
Retr0id 8mo ago
Free as in puppy Edit: The title of the post originally started with "If code is free,"
- ludicity 8mo ago
  This was funny enough that I checked out your blog and it absolutely rules.
  - slopinthebag 8mo ago
    I was gonna make a joke about this being their second account but I checked it out and you're right lol.
- tokenless 8mo ago
  As a puppy owner and lover of "Free as in speech" etc. phrases. I applaud!
- dbreunig 8mo ago
  I keep saying this, it’s my new favorite metaphor.
- sebmellen 8mo ago
  Best HN comment in a long time
- catgirlinspace 8mo ago
  what exactly does this mean (i am a puppy and don’t understand…)
  - slopinthebag 8mo ago
    same thing free as it cat means (i am a cat, meow) it just means that it might be free for my owner to adopt me, but it sure as hell aint free for them to spoil me
    - 8mo ago
rr808 8mo ago
Can we talk about how much copilot sucks in vscode? I have to use for work, buggy as hell for the premier product of a trillion dollar company.
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- cedws 8mo ago
  I use Claude Code in Zed via ACP and have issues all the time. It pushes me towards using the CLI, but I don’t want to do things that way because it’s a vibe coding workflow. I want to be in the drivers seat, see what the agent has done and be able apply or reject hunks.
  - chambored 8mo ago
    I’m in the same situation. Zed’s Claude Code is better in terms of control, but it’s wildly buggy and unreliable. Definitely not a drop in replacement.
    - st3fan 8mo ago
      File the bugs if you want to see things improved.
- hu3 8mo ago
  Not my experience. What doesn't work for you? I use Opus 4.6 (for complex refactoring), Gemini 3.1 Pro (for html/css/web stuff) and GPT Codex 5.3 (workhorse, replaced Sonnet for me because in Copilot it has larger context) mostly. For small tools. But also for large projects. Current projects are: 1) .NET C#, Angular, Oracle database. Around 300k LoC. 2) Full stack TypeScript with Hono on backend, React on frontend glued by trpc, kysely and PostgreSQL. Around 120k LoC. Works well in both. I'm using plan mode and agent mode. What helps a ton are e2e playright tests which are executed by the agent after each code change. My only complain is that it tends to get stutters after many sessions/hours. A restart fixes it. $39/mo plan.
OGEnthusiast 8mo ago
[dead]
SuperHeavy256 8mo ago
Call them out, call them out. Why isn't Claude a native Windows x64 app if code is free?
- shimman 8mo ago
  Seriously, they claim to be able to make a C compiler but they can't make a TUI without using javascript? It's beyond pathetic.
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    To be fair in that respect, Claude code does have a native rust implementation you can use.
- jwoq9118 8mo ago
  And if software engineering has been solved by AI, why is Anthropic still hiring and employing SWE's? https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-code-founder-ai-impacts-software-engineer-role-2026-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-code-founde...
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  If the AI is writing 100% of the code it literally is free (as in time) for them to move them over to native apps. They should have used the tokens for that C compiler on the native apps, would have made for a much more convincing marketing story as well.
827a 8mo ago
Electron isn't that bad. Apps like VSCode and Obsidian are among the highest quality and most performant apps I have installed. The Claude app's problem is not electron; its that it just sucks, bad. Stop blaming problems on nativeness.
- AreShoesFeet000 8mo ago
  Maybe Electron isn’t that bad. Maybe there are some great Electron apps. But there’s a big chunk that went unsaid: Most Electron apps suck. Does correlation here imply causation? Maybe not, but holy fuck isn’t it frustrating to be a user of Electron apps.
  - bdangubic 8mo ago
    it is not that most electron apps suck, the ones OP listed suck
- vsgherzi 8mo ago
  I think you’re missing the point a little friendo, it’s not that electron is bad it’s that electron itself is an abstraction for cross platform support. If code can be generated for free then the question is why do we need this to begin with why can’t Claude write it in win32, SwiftUI, and gtk? The answer of course is that it can’t do it and maintain compatibility between all three well enough as it’s high effort and each has its own idiosyncrasies.
  - linsomniac 8mo ago
    I don't know about whether Electron fits in this case, but I can say Claude isn't equally proficient at all toolchains. I recently had Claude Code (Opus 4.6, agent teams) build a image manipulation webapp in Python, Go, Rust, and Zig. In python it was very nearly a 1-shot, there was an issue with one watermark not showing up on one API endpoint that I had to give it a couple kicks at the can to fix. Go it was able to get but it needed 5+ attempts at rework. Rust took ~10+, and Zig took maybe 15+. They were all given the same prompt, though they all likely would have dont much better if I had it build a test suite or at least a manual testing recipe for it to follow.
overgard 8mo ago
I don't think anyone on the AI hype train cares about performance, memory usage, or code quality (measured by bugs). Customers will, though.
- awepofiwaop 8mo ago
  Judging by the state of most software I use, customers genuinely could not care less about bugs. Software quality is basically never a product differentiator at this point.
  - overgard 8mo ago
    Tell that to people abandoning Windows. (I'm writing this on a Linux machine right now) Most users are forced to use the software that they use. That doesn't mean they don't care, just that they're stuck. BTW, this going to matter MORE now that RAM prices are skyrocketing..
    - awepofiwaop 8mo ago
      I'm not saying zero actual people care, I'm saying that not enough people care to actually differentiate. Is Windows getting better now that you switched? Then it doesn't matter you left.
      - overgard 8mo ago
        I mean, Microsoft has recently made a statement that they're aware people are mad and they're working on it, so, no, I don't think they care that I personally hate the software but they do care that there are a number of people like me. Whether that moves the needle, I don't know, but what I do know is right now I'm using non-slop non-electron software and it's so much more pleasant. I think it's worth protecting.
      - al_borland 8mo ago
        Actually, Microsoft did say they are going to work to fix things. https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/microsoft-has-finally-started-its-campaign-to-make-windows-11-better-heres-whats-getting-fixed-in-the-next-update https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/microsoft-has-fi... It seems like enough people do care to make Microsoft move.
thepancake 8mo ago
Nailed it.
Austin_Conlon 8mo ago
Would be a much better UX if it had multi-window support and a separate settings window.
selridge 8mo ago
Why stop there! We should refuse to accept coding agents until they have fully replaced chromium. By that point, the world will see that our reticence was wisdom.
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- zamadatix 8mo ago
  The article already concludes coding agents have uses in areas they already do well. What specifically can be continued leading you to think should instead not be used?
  - selridge 8mo ago
    The claim that somehow "code is free now" is struck low by anthropic choosing electron is silly and deserves ridicule. I guess I don't understand how people don't see something like 20k + an engineer-month producing CCC as the actual flare being shot into the night that it is. Enough to make this penny ante shit about "hurr hurr they could've written a native app" asinine. They took a solid crack at GCC, one of the most complex things *made by man* armed with a bunch of compute, some engineers guiding a swarm, and some engineers writing tests. Does it fail at key parts? Yes. It is a MIRACLE and a WARNING that it exists at all? YES. Do you know what you would have with an engineer-month and 20k in compute trying to write GCC from scratch in 2 weeks in 2024? A whole heck of a lot less than they got. This notion that everything is the same just didn't make contact on 2025, and we're in 2026 now. All of software is already changing and HN is full of wanking about all the wrong stuff.
    - zamadatix 8mo ago
      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 coding agents.
jsheard 8mo ago
Likewise OpenAIs browser is still only available on macOS, four months after launch, despite being built on a mature browser engine which already runs on everything under the sun. Seems like low-hanging fruit, and yet...
- crims0n 8mo ago
  Probably has more to do with underwhelming adoption than anything else.
  - deleted 8mo ago
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  - no-name-here 8mo ago
    I'm guessing you're saying no one wants it? As otherwise, launching on an OS that has ~3% market share (on top of a cross-platform engine) will prevent the vast majority of adoption, yes.
nozzlegear 8mo ago
The Claude app is one giant garbanzo bean. I uninstalled it and pinned the web app to my dock instead.
ivankra 8mo ago
> For now, Electron still makes sense A few years ago maybe. Tauri makes better sense for this use case today - like Electron but with system webviews, so at least doesn't bloat your system with extra copies of Chrome. And strongly encourages Rust for the application core over JS/Node.
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  Electron has never made sense. It is only capable of making poorly performing software which eats the user's RAM for no good reason. Any developer who takes pride in his work would never use a tool as bad as Electron.
  - Austizzle 7mo ago
    > in his work Women, however, are welcome to use electron
qudat 8mo ago
Code isn’t free when you have to review and QA it
Jackevansevo 8mo ago
Because Anthropic and the rest of them are lying to you about the sophistication of these tools. The fact that claude code is a still buggy mess is a testament to the quality of the dream they're trying to sell.
- linsomniac 8mo ago
  >claude code is a still buggy mess What bugs are you seeing? I use Claude Code a lot on an Ubuntu 22.04 system and I've had very few issues with it. I'm not sure really how to quantify the amount of use; maybe "ccusage" is a good metric? That says over the last month I've used $964, and I've got 6-8 months of use on it, though only the last ~3-5 at that level. And I've got fairly wide use as well: MCP, skills, agents, agent teams...
  - rileymichael 8mo ago
    there's currently ~6k open issues and ~20k closed ones on their issue tracker (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues). certainly a mix of duplicates / feature requests, but 'buggy mess' seems appropriate
    - Maxious 8mo ago
      you can also judge for yourself based on the changelog https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELO... maybe we don't have AGI to prevent all bugs. but surely some of these could have been caught with some good old fashioned elbow grease and code review.
hparadiz 8mo ago
Write everything in C.
emporas 8mo ago
Not all code qualities are free. Good quality code, still expensive.
- MoreQARespect 8mo ago
  Youve been able to hire a dirt cheap Indian or fillipino living on poverty wages in those countries to knock out cheap crap for a long time.
yodsanklai 8mo ago
Because code isn't free. I can see it in my team. We've all been using Claude a lot for the last 6 months. It's hard to measure the impact, but I can tell our systems are as buggy as ever. AI isn't a silver bullet.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 8mo ago
  Why isn't Claude doing QA testing for you?
  - slopinthebag 8mo ago
    I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but if not, you cant rely on the thing that produced invalid output to validate it's own output. That is fundementally insufficient, despite it potentially catching some errors.
    - _2d30 8mo ago
      Damn. Guess I'll stop QAing my own work from now.
      - Spivak 8mo ago
        I mean there is some wisdom to that, most teams separate dev and qa and writers aren't their own editors precisely because it's hard for the author of a thing to spot their own mistakes. When you merge them into one it's usually a cost saving measure accepting that quality control will take a hit.
      - meheleventyone 8mo ago
        Uh, yeah, thh hi is has been considered bad practice for decades.
      - ryan_n 8mo ago
        That is often how software development has been done the past several decades yea... Not to say that you don't review your own work, but it's good practice for others (or at least one other person) to review it/QA it as well.
greyman 8mo ago
But nobody says code is free(?). Certainly not Claude, that experimental compiler costs $20K to build. That openclaw author admitted in Lex Fridman talk that he spends $10k's on tokens each month.
- littlestymaar 8mo ago
  Anthropic being valuated $380B makes $20k practically free for all intent and purpose. Given how much they pay their developers, the Claud app probably cost at least 2, and likely 3, orders of magnitude more to build. If their AI could do the same for $2m they'll definitely do that any day.
dostick 8mo ago
If author tried native macOS development with agent for an hour, they wouldn’t know where to begin explaining how different is agentic web development from native. It was better year ago, you could actually get to build a native app. Now all models over-think everything, they do things they like and igniter hard constraints. They picked all that in training. All these behaviours, hiding mistakes, shameful silence, going “woke” and doing what they think should be done despite your wishes. All this is meliorated in web development, but for native it made it a lot worse. And visual testing, compare in-browser easy automated ride with retest-it-yourself for 50th time.
alexfromapex 8mo ago
I don't know why anyone uses Electron anymore, Tauri produces much smaller binaries and is amazing.
- neodymiumphish 8mo ago
  Agreed! I built a MacOS Postgres client with just Claude Code[1]. It could use some UI improvements, but it runs much better than other apps I’ve tried (specifically what it’s replacing for me: RazorSQL) and the binary is smaller than 20MB. 1: https://github.com/NeodymiumPhish/Pharos https://github.com/NeodymiumPhish/Pharos
  - nicoburns 8mo ago
    It's not free, but Postico is excellent https://eggerapps.at/postico2 https://eggerapps.at/postico2
  - lsaferite 8mo ago
    Tauri is still a WebView wrapped in some chrome, right? That's not what I would consider "native".
    - ivankra 8mo ago
      Eh, didn't even Microsoft give up and just shipped a React-based start menu at one point? The range of "native" on Windows 11 is quite wide - starts with an ancient Windows 3.1 ODBC dialog box.
    - neodymiumphish 8mo ago
      Yes. I’d prefer a native interface and have been working on that. I should change the readme until that’s complete.
- torginus 8mo ago
  I don't know why anyone uses Tauri - disk space is cheap but having to handle QA and supporting quirks for every possible browser engine the users' system could ship with certainly is not.
tpae 8mo ago
The framing here assumes you need to ship native to all 3 platforms to justify leaving Electron. You don't. I've been building a native macOS AI client in Swift — it's 15MB, provider-agnostic, and open source: https://github.com/dinoki-ai/osaurus https://github.com/dinoki-ai/osaurus Committing to one platform well beats a mediocre Electron wrapper on all three.
- owenpalmer 8mo ago
  Link gives 404
  - tpae 8mo ago
    just fixed it
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  Yeah, like you don't need to write three different clients. You can write a native MacOS client and ship your electron client for the irrelevant platforms.
- Austizzle 7mo ago
  As somebody who frequently switches between windows and Linux, I will pretty much never install an app that's only on one platform. Cross platform options mean I don't need to pay for or learn separate apps for the same thing on each OS I don't care if it's QT or a WebView or something else, I just want to lower friction for myself
mtimmerm 8mo ago
Claude code runs in the terminal, not Chromium. It's hardly an "electron app" at all. It's a nodejs app, and there is no reason to have a problem with that. Nodejs can wait for inference as fast as any native app can.
- rlpb 8mo ago
  > It's a nodejs app, and there is no reason to have a problem with that. Node apps typically have serious software supply chain problems. Their dependency trees are typically unauditable in practice.
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  Aren't they talking about the desktop app though? Also I refuse to download and run Node.js programs due to the security risk. Unfortunately that keeps me away from opencode as well, but thankfully Codex and Vibe are not Node.js, and neither is Zed or Jetbrains products.
- owenpalmer 8mo ago
  They're not talking about Claude code
- jdgoesmarching 8mo ago
  Desktop app.
BoiledCabbage 8mo ago
Because Anthropic has never claimed that code is free? It's pretty easy to argue your point if you pick a strawman as your opponent. They have said that you can be significantly more productive (which seems to be the case for many) and that most of their company primarily uses LLM to write code and no longer write it by hand. They also seems to be doing well w.r.t. competition. There are legitimate complaints to be made against LLMs, pick one of them - but don't make up things to argue against.
- vasco 8mo ago
  Head of Claude Code at Anthropic 3 days ago: "Coding is largely solved" https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-...
  - teemur 8mo ago
    I'm not sure coding has ever been the hard part. Hard part (to me) has always been to be smart enough to know what, exactly, I (or somebody else) want. Or has someone heard of a case when someone says something like "These requirements are perfectly clear and unambiguous and do not have any undefined edge/corner cases. But implementing that is still really hard, much harder than what producing this unicorn requirements spec was"?
    - oytis 8mo ago
      But they already know what they want, they have it. Rewriting it to be more efficient and less buggy should be the lowly coding that is supposed to be solved
- oytis 8mo ago
  Point still stands. If you are so much more productive and have some of the most expensive engineers in the world, why not write something decent
  - throwaw12 8mo ago
mococa 8mo ago
Claude desktop really sucks, a monster on resource hog
dcchambers 8mo ago
Actual reason: there's far more training data available for electron apps than native apps. And despite what Anthropic and OpenAI want you to think, these LLMs are not AGI. They cannot invent something new. They are only as good as the training data.
- wgbowley 8mo ago
  Real.
tokenless 8mo ago
Code is cheaper but not free is why. Also AI is better at beaten path coding. Spend more tokens on native or spend them on marketing?
condiment 8mo ago
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 useful impact.
- danny_codes 8mo ago
  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.
atlgator 8mo ago
The cobbler's children have no shoes, but at least the cobbler's children aren't running three instances of Chromium.
harel 8mo ago
Here is what worries me the most at the moment: we're in a period of hype, fire all the developers, we have agents, everybody can code now, barrier is not low - it's gone. Great. Roll up a year from now, and we have trillions of lines of code no human wrote. At some point, like a big PR, the agent's driver will just say yes to every change. Nobody now can understand the code easily because nobody wrote it. It works, kinda, but how? Who knows? Roll up another few years and people who were just coding because it's a "job" forget whatever skill they had. I've heard a few times already the phrase "I didn't code in like 10 months, bruh"... Then what? Not saying I'm not using AI - because I am. I'm using it in the IDE so I can stay close to every update and understand why it's there, and disagree with it if it shouldn't be there. I'm scared to be distanced from the code I'm supposed to be familiar with. So I use the AI to give me superpowers but not to completely do my job for me.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  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...
  - harel 8mo ago
    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...
    - CamperBob2 8mo ago
      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.
      - harel 8mo ago
        But Greek and Latin don't underpin our entire planet's infrastructure... Software does.
Keekgette 8mo ago
[dead]
llbbdd 8mo ago
This post and this entire thread are HN-sniping to the millionth degree. We have all the classics here: - AI bad - JavaScript bad - Developers not understanding why Electron has utility because they don't understand the browser as a fourth OS platform - Electron eats my ram oh no posted from my 2gb thinkpad
- ra0x03 8mo ago
  My guy if you can’t see the problem with a $300B SF company that of course claims to #HireTheBest having a dumpy UX due to their technical choices I don’t really know what to tell you. Same goes for these companies having npm as an out-of-the-box dependency for their default CLI tools. I’m going to assume anyone who thinks that every user’s machine is powerful enough to run electron apps, or even support bloated deps hasn’t written any serious software. And that’s fine in general (to each their own!), but these companies publicly, strongly, claim to be the best, and hire the best. These are not small 10 people startups.
  - selridge 8mo ago
    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?
    - rustystump 8mo ago
      Bun exists and building a ui on too of that should be well within the power of the money they have. No one is saying to rebuild the universe but the current state is embarrassing.
      - selridge 8mo ago
        Yeah but what does the statement refute? We can all talk about how this or that app should be different, but the idea is "electron sux => ????? " Why should I care that they didn't rebuild the desktop app I don't use. Their TUI is really nice.
goodquestions 8mo ago
Ho is Claude?
cpeterso 8mo ago
Or they could write native client apps using Qt to handle that “last 10%” of native app polish.
robertoandred 8mo ago
I really hope React Native’s support for Mac and Windows apps takes off. The benefits of Electron without Chromium, plus native controls/functions.
PunchyHamster 8mo ago
The garbage one is now indeed essentially free
zamadatix 8mo ago
The use of "Free" in the title is probably too much of a distraction from the content (even though the opening starts with an actual cost). The point of the article does not actually revolve about LLM code generation being $0 but that's what most of the responses will be about because of the title.
khalic 8mo ago
Probably the same reason _teams_ is a js app, money
bcherny 8mo ago
Boris from the Claude Code team here. Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it. That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!
- blibble 8mo ago
  this is you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw if that's the case, why don't you just ask it to "make it not shit"?
  - kenonet 8mo ago
    hahaha
  - runlevel1 8mo ago
    I'm not sure what's more insane: That they're willing to make those claims or that companies are willing to downsize based on them.
  - afroboy 8mo ago
    Like Warren Buffett said, Never ask your barber if you need a haircut.
- PKop 8mo ago
  Users would benefit from native apps, hopefully you guys will give it a try. I bet Claude would be great at it too, no?
- deleted 8mo ago
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- endergen 8mo ago
  The second you wanted to add a webview, you want Electron. Devs want Chrome DevTools and Chrome runtime. You guys just did add it too, so yeah!
lateforwork 8mo ago
> Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes. I only see these complaints on HN. Real users don't have this complaint. What kind of low-end machines are you running, that Chromium engine is too heavy for you? > They are often laggy or unresponsive. That's not due to Electron. > They don’t integrate well with OS features. If it is good enough for Microsoft Teams it is probably good enough for most apps. Teams can integrate with microphone, camera, clipboard, file system and so on. What else do you want to integrate with?
- jmalicki 8mo ago
  Both electron is too heavy for you, and the other non-Electron overhead of Claude is fine.
- hodgehog11 8mo ago
  I agree with your counterpoint to OS integration, but Microsoft Teams is infamous for not being "good enough" otherwise. Laggy, buggy, unresponsive, a massive resource hog especially if it runs at startup. It's gotten a bit better, but not enough. These are not complaints on HN, they're in my workplace. Not everyone is running the latest and greatest hardware, very few actually have the money for that. If you're running hardware from before this decade, or especially the early 2010s, the difference between an Electron app and a native app is unbelievably stark. Electron will often bring the device to its knees.
- cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
  A single Electron app is usually not a problem. The problem is that the average user has a pile of Chrome tabs open in addition to a handful of Electron apps on top of increasingly bloated commercial OSes, which all compound to consume a large percentage of available resources. This is particularly pertinent on bulk-purchased corporate and education machines which are loaded down with mandated spyware and antivirus garbage and often ship with CPUs that lag many years behind, and in the case of laptops might even have dog slow eMMC storage which makes the inevitable virtual memory paging miserable.
- RachelF 8mo ago
antirez 8mo ago
Cluade is an Electron app because this is a cultural issue, not a technological one. Electron could make sense if you are a startup with limited development force. For big companies that want to make a difference, to hire N developers and maintain N native apps is one of the best bet on quality and UX you can do, yet people don't do it even in large companies that have the ability, in theory, to do it. Similarly even if with automatic programming you could do it more easily, still it is not done. It's a cultural issue, part of the fact that who makes software does not try to make the best possible software anymore.
_pdp_ 8mo ago
Code is not and will never be free. You pay for it one way or another. It will take a couple of years for things to cool down to realise that there is more to software than writing the code. But even if AI can write all the code - who is going to understand it. Don't tell me this is not needed. RTFM is what gives hacker the edge. I doubt any company want to be in a position where they simply have no clue how their main product actually works.
astrostl 8mo ago
The quality of the ChatGPT Mac app is a major driver for me to keep a subscription. Hotkeys work, app feels slick and native. The Claude Mac app I found so poor that I'd never reach for it, and ended up uninstalling it — despite using the heck out of Claude Code on a Max plan — because it started blocking system restarts for updates.
tom1337 8mo ago
I don't care wether its electron or not but the now ship a full vm with Claude which not only takes 15 GB of storage but also uses so much memory even though I just use chat. Why does that even need to be started?
- wtetzner 8mo ago
  Especially now that they've made RAM so expensive.
Kiro 8mo ago
LLMs are best at JavaScript.
- dude250711 8mo ago
  Which happens to be the majority of code they had stolen.
  - Kiro 8mo ago
    Yes, so Electron is naturally the best target for any LLM.
hacker_homie 8mo ago
Because it's the most popular & flexible cross platform user space compositor: - unlike QT it's free for commercial use. - I don't know any other user land GUI toolkit/compositor that isn't a game engine(unity/unreal/etc).
- WD-42 8mo ago
  Why does it need to be cross platform? If code was free there would be a native app for each platform using its respective toolkit, not QT.
  - hacker_homie 8mo ago
    Well they wanted it to be cross plat because more users. clearly the code isn’t free and writing for raw win32 is painful.
- mkl 8mo ago
  Qt is LGPL, so free for commercial use in most situations.
  - hacker_homie 8mo ago
    There are rules when using the lgpl version of qt, the kde foundation has an exception I think. https://www.qt.io/development/open-source-lgpl-obligations https://www.qt.io/development/open-source-lgpl-obligations
fassssst 8mo ago
Because it doesn’t matter. The biggest AI apps of last year were command line interfaces for cripes sake. Functionality and rapid iteration is more important. If only AI had more Liquid Glass, lol
internet2000 8mo ago
I bet it's because of Windows idiosyncrasies.
deleted 8mo ago
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tigoo 8mo ago
electron is comprehensive. maybe claude is not there yet. ecosystem still important
486sx33 8mo ago
[dead]
Robdel12 8mo ago
Heh, I felt the same. I'm a web dev but I do not want a electron app. We can do better, I used to write electron apps because I wasn't able to build a proper native app. Now I can! I've been building a native macOS/iOS app that lets me manage my agents. Both the ability to actually control/chat fully from the app and to just monitor your existing CLI sessions (and/or take 'em over in the app). Terrible little demo as I work on it right now w/claude: https://i.imgur.com/ght1g3t.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/ght1g3t.mp4 iOS app w/codex: https://i.imgur.com/YNhlu4q.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/YNhlu4q.mp4 Also has a rust server that backs it so I can throw it anywhere (container, pi, etc) and the connect to it. If anyone wants to see it, but I have seen like 4 other people at least doing something similar: https://github.com/Robdel12/OrbitDock https://github.com/Robdel12/OrbitDock
wycx 8mo ago
I have been getting claude to us free pascal/lazarus to write cross-platform (linux qt & gtk, windows and cocoa) apps as well as porting 30-year old abandoned Windows Delphi apps to all three platforms using precisely because I can end up with a small, single binary for distribution after static linking. I hope that prevalence of AI coding agents might lead to a bit of a revival of RAD tools like lazarus, which seem to me to have a good model for creating cross-platform apps.
wzdd 8mo ago
The gotcha style "if AI is so good, why does $AI_COMPANY's software not meet my particular standard for quality" blog posts are already getting tedious.
deleted 8mo ago
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waynesonfire 8mo ago
Because coding is not the hard part.
pipeline_peak 8mo ago
Tldr nailing down all the edge cases
Liftyee 8mo ago
Why is no one admitting that even though resources like RAM, CPU, etc. are plentiful nowadays, they should still be conserved? Computers have gotten orders of magnitude faster since 2016, but using mainstream apps certainly don't feel any faster. Electron and similar frameworks do offer appealing engineering tradeoffs, but they are a main culprit of this problem. Sure, the magnitude of RAM/compute "waste" may have grown from kB to MB, but inefficiency is still inefficiency - no matter how powerful the machine it's running on is.
namegulf 8mo ago
Your post already clearly covers the reason. It is easy to crank out a one-off, flashy tool using Claude (to demo its capabilities), which may tick 80% of the development work. If you've to maintain it, improve, grow for the long haul, good luck with it. That's the 20% hard. They took the safe bet!
game_the0ry 8mo ago
Electron is a good choice for native-like desktop apps, even with the downsides. Yes, feel free to downvote me.
pessimizer 8mo ago
I assume it's because LLMs are overrated and trash so they chose something that was easy for lazy developers, but I'm probably just cynical. You would think with programming becoming completely automated by the end of 2026, there'd be a vibe coded native port for every platform, but they must be holding back to keep us from all getting jealous.
MontyCarloHall 8mo ago
I am curious how much Claude Code is used to develop Anthropic's backend infrastructure, since that's a true feat of engineering where the real magic happens.
felixrieseberg 8mo ago
Hi, Felix here - I'm responsible for said Electron app, including Claude Code Desktop and Claude Cowork. All technology choices are about trade-offs, and while our desktop app does actually include a decent amount of Rust, Swift, and Go, but I understand the question - it comes up a lot. Why use web technologies at all? And why ship your own engine? I've written a long-form version of answers to those questions here: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/why-electron https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/why-electron To us, Electron is just a tool. We co-maintain it with a bunch of excellent other people but we're not precious about it - we might choose something different in the future.
- sarchertech 8mo ago
  Let’s ignore electron. Your app has many UI/UX and performance flaws. If as your CEO says “coding is largely solved”, why is this the case? Or is your CEO wrong and coding is not largely solved?
  - phist_mcgee 8mo ago
    What kind of project lead is going to answer for their CEO?
    - sarchertech 8mo ago
      Not a normal one but also a normal project lead doesn’t get on HN and start publicly answering questions. If you’re gonna start speaking for and defending your company though and your company CEO has made asinine statements that are related, I’m gonna ask.
  - selridge 8mo ago
    APP BAD! If coding SOLVED HOW COME APP BAD.
    - incognition 8mo ago
      this compiles on my machine
yibers 8mo ago
Look at their backlog...
jongjong 8mo ago
Because JavaScript is the best for the application layer. We just have to accept that this is reality. AI training sets are just full of JS... Good JS, bad JS... But the good JS training is really good if you can tap into it. You just have to be really careful because the agent can easily slip into JS hell; it has no shortage of that in its training.
adamtaylor_13 8mo ago
As many have pointed out, code is not free. More than that, the ability to go fast only makes architectural mistakes WORSE. You'll drive further down the road before realizing you made the wrong turn. A native app is the wrong abstraction for many desktop apps. The complexity of maintaining several separate codebases likely isn't worth the value add. Especially for a company hemorrhaging money the way the Anthropic does.
eviks 8mo ago
> The resulting compiler is impressive, given the time it took to deliver it and the number of people who worked on it, but it is largely unusable. That last mile is hard. You're easy to impress, that explains the unrealistic expectations "on the surface". That's some strange analogy, though, basic usability is the first mile, not the last. Coming back to the frameworks and apps, the last mile would be respecting Mac unique keyboard bindings file for text editing. First mile is reacting to any keyboard input in a text field. Same with the compiler, basic hello world fail isn't the last mile.
umairnadeem123 8mo ago
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sujee 8mo ago
Claude should have gone for native apps and demonstrated that it is possible to do anything with their AI. I'm currently building a macOS AI chat app. Generally SwiftUI/AppKit is far better than Web but it performs bad in few areas. One of them is Markdown viewer. Swift Markdown libraries are slow and lacks some features like Mermaid diagrams. To work around this, some of my competitors use Tauri/Electron and few others use WKWebView inside Swift app. Initially I tried WKWebView. Performance was fine and the bridge between JS and Swift was not that hard to implement but I started seeing few problems especially due to the fact that WebView runs as separate process and usually a single WebView instance is reused across views. After few attempts to fix them, I gave up the idea and tempted to go fully with Web rendering with Tauri but as a mac developer I couldn't think about building this app in React. So I started building my own Markdown library. After a month of work, I now have a high-performance Markdown library built with Rust and TextKit. It supports streaming and Markdown extensions like Mermaid. Most of the code was written by Claude Opus, and some tricky parts were solved by Codex. The important lesson I learned is that I’m no longer going to accept limitations in tech and stop there. If something isn’t available in Swift but is available in JS, I’m going to port it. It’s surprisingly doable with Claude.
- SomeUserName432 8mo ago
  > Claude should have gone for native apps and demonstrated that it is possible to do anything with their AI. Using IntelliJ I actually find myself wishing for an integrated webview of Github Copilot. The native view is absolutely terrible, jumping up and down non stop.
wraptile 8mo ago
This is such a litmus test for a tool that "in few months will be writing 90% of all code". If a multi-billion dollar bleeding edge company can't use Claude Code to create and maintain a native GUI then no one else stands a chance.
TrailingArbutus 8mo ago
Why do people hate Electron???? Like, VSCode, Cursor, whatsapp like hello? fast dev and flexibility > over optimized native stuff.
- marcelox86 8mo ago
  It is so disingenuous to mention the whatsapp electron client and not pretend its a slow turd. or maybe your comment is sarcasm and i just can’t notice it
cyrusradfar 8mo ago
OT: I use Tauri exclusively for apps these days when I'm building and it's specular. Never going back.
hfriedrich 8mo ago
Interesting perspective on the tradeoffs. I've been exploring the opposite end of this spectrum — I built a C#/WPF app that uses LLM APIs to generate fully native desktop applications from prompts at runtime. Think Canvas or Claude Code artifacts, but the output is compiled WPF with actual native controls, not a web view. The app handles NuGet dependency resolution on the fly, catches runtime errors and feeds them back to the model for self-correction, and can export standalone executables (WPF for Windows, Avalonia for cross-platform). Everything is self-contained — users don't need to install any SDKs, IDEs, or toolchains. I'm a teacher, not a startup founder, and I've been trying to market this commercially without much luck. Seriously considering open-sourcing the whole thing. Would love to hear what people here think about the native-vs-web approach for AI-generated applications. Happy to do a quick demo if anyone's curious.
throw_rust 7mo ago
Code is free but some code is freer than others.

428 points by dbreunig 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

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CTDOCodebases 8mo ago

Because when a service is running at a loss the investors want their money to be spent efficiently.

mihaela 8mo ago

Exactly. Shameful explanation.

BoredPositron 8mo ago

Yawn the 90/10 excuse again and 'Shipping it everywhere' is a blatant lie there is still no Linux release. Looks like you are talking about Claude Code as Claude. Claude would be the Desktop app...

Vaslo 8mo ago
Because it’s an Electron app, I use on Omarchy Linux with no problem
- BoredPositron 8mo ago
  There is no official release and some features don't work if you patch it to work on Linux.

the__alchemist 8mo ago

Or: Why can't I log in to Claude on my laptop? It opens a browser with an indefinite spinner, and when I click "Login" on the website, it forwards me to register instead. Not really selling it as the future of coding if their fundamentals are this screwed up!

jsiepkes 8mo ago

That, and the IntellIJ plugin of Claude is basically the Claude CLI running in a terminal. Also pretty underwhelming.

Retr0id 8mo ago

Free as in puppy Edit: The title of the post originally started with "If code is free,"

ludicity 8mo ago
This was funny enough that I checked out your blog and it absolutely rules.
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  I was gonna make a joke about this being their second account but I checked it out and you're right lol.
tokenless 8mo ago
As a puppy owner and lover of "Free as in speech" etc. phrases. I applaud!
dbreunig 8mo ago
I keep saying this, it’s my new favorite metaphor.
sebmellen 8mo ago
Best HN comment in a long time
catgirlinspace 8mo ago
what exactly does this mean (i am a puppy and don’t understand…)
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  same thing free as it cat means (i am a cat, meow) it just means that it might be free for my owner to adopt me, but it sure as hell aint free for them to spoil me
  - 8mo ago

rr808 8mo ago

Can we talk about how much copilot sucks in vscode? I have to use for work, buggy as hell for the premier product of a trillion dollar company.

deleted 8mo ago
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- deleted 8mo ago
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cedws 8mo ago
I use Claude Code in Zed via ACP and have issues all the time. It pushes me towards using the CLI, but I don’t want to do things that way because it’s a vibe coding workflow. I want to be in the drivers seat, see what the agent has done and be able apply or reject hunks.
- chambored 8mo ago
  I’m in the same situation. Zed’s Claude Code is better in terms of control, but it’s wildly buggy and unreliable. Definitely not a drop in replacement.
  - st3fan 8mo ago
    File the bugs if you want to see things improved.
hu3 8mo ago
Not my experience. What doesn't work for you? I use Opus 4.6 (for complex refactoring), Gemini 3.1 Pro (for html/css/web stuff) and GPT Codex 5.3 (workhorse, replaced Sonnet for me because in Copilot it has larger context) mostly. For small tools. But also for large projects. Current projects are: 1) .NET C#, Angular, Oracle database. Around 300k LoC. 2) Full stack TypeScript with Hono on backend, React on frontend glued by trpc, kysely and PostgreSQL. Around 120k LoC. Works well in both. I'm using plan mode and agent mode. What helps a ton are e2e playright tests which are executed by the agent after each code change. My only complain is that it tends to get stutters after many sessions/hours. A restart fixes it. $39/mo plan.

OGEnthusiast 8mo ago

[dead]

SuperHeavy256 8mo ago

Call them out, call them out. Why isn't Claude a native Windows x64 app if code is free?

shimman 8mo ago
Seriously, they claim to be able to make a C compiler but they can't make a TUI without using javascript? It's beyond pathetic.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  To be fair in that respect, Claude code does have a native rust implementation you can use.
jwoq9118 8mo ago
And if software engineering has been solved by AI, why is Anthropic still hiring and employing SWE's? https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-code-founder-ai-impacts-software-engineer-role-2026-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-code-founde...
slopinthebag 8mo ago
If the AI is writing 100% of the code it literally is free (as in time) for them to move them over to native apps. They should have used the tokens for that C compiler on the native apps, would have made for a much more convincing marketing story as well.

827a 8mo ago

Electron isn't that bad. Apps like VSCode and Obsidian are among the highest quality and most performant apps I have installed. The Claude app's problem is not electron; its that it just sucks, bad. Stop blaming problems on nativeness.

AreShoesFeet000 8mo ago
Maybe Electron isn’t that bad. Maybe there are some great Electron apps. But there’s a big chunk that went unsaid: Most Electron apps suck. Does correlation here imply causation? Maybe not, but holy fuck isn’t it frustrating to be a user of Electron apps.
- bdangubic 8mo ago
  it is not that most electron apps suck, the ones OP listed suck
vsgherzi 8mo ago
I think you’re missing the point a little friendo, it’s not that electron is bad it’s that electron itself is an abstraction for cross platform support. If code can be generated for free then the question is why do we need this to begin with why can’t Claude write it in win32, SwiftUI, and gtk? The answer of course is that it can’t do it and maintain compatibility between all three well enough as it’s high effort and each has its own idiosyncrasies.
- linsomniac 8mo ago
  I don't know about whether Electron fits in this case, but I can say Claude isn't equally proficient at all toolchains. I recently had Claude Code (Opus 4.6, agent teams) build a image manipulation webapp in Python, Go, Rust, and Zig. In python it was very nearly a 1-shot, there was an issue with one watermark not showing up on one API endpoint that I had to give it a couple kicks at the can to fix. Go it was able to get but it needed 5+ attempts at rework. Rust took ~10+, and Zig took maybe 15+. They were all given the same prompt, though they all likely would have dont much better if I had it build a test suite or at least a manual testing recipe for it to follow.

overgard 8mo ago

I don't think anyone on the AI hype train cares about performance, memory usage, or code quality (measured by bugs). Customers will, though.

awepofiwaop 8mo ago
Judging by the state of most software I use, customers genuinely could not care less about bugs. Software quality is basically never a product differentiator at this point.
- overgard 8mo ago
  Tell that to people abandoning Windows. (I'm writing this on a Linux machine right now) Most users are forced to use the software that they use. That doesn't mean they don't care, just that they're stuck. BTW, this going to matter MORE now that RAM prices are skyrocketing..
  - awepofiwaop 8mo ago
    I'm not saying zero actual people care, I'm saying that not enough people care to actually differentiate. Is Windows getting better now that you switched? Then it doesn't matter you left.
    - overgard 8mo ago
      I mean, Microsoft has recently made a statement that they're aware people are mad and they're working on it, so, no, I don't think they care that I personally hate the software but they do care that there are a number of people like me. Whether that moves the needle, I don't know, but what I do know is right now I'm using non-slop non-electron software and it's so much more pleasant. I think it's worth protecting.
    - al_borland 8mo ago
      Actually, Microsoft did say they are going to work to fix things. https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/microsoft-has-finally-started-its-campaign-to-make-windows-11-better-heres-whats-getting-fixed-in-the-next-update https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/microsoft-has-fi... It seems like enough people do care to make Microsoft move.

thepancake 8mo ago

Nailed it.

Austin_Conlon 8mo ago

Would be a much better UX if it had multi-window support and a separate settings window.

selridge 8mo ago

Why stop there! We should refuse to accept coding agents until they have fully replaced chromium. By that point, the world will see that our reticence was wisdom.

deleted 8mo ago
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zamadatix 8mo ago
The article already concludes coding agents have uses in areas they already do well. What specifically can be continued leading you to think should instead not be used?
- selridge 8mo ago
  The claim that somehow "code is free now" is struck low by anthropic choosing electron is silly and deserves ridicule. I guess I don't understand how people don't see something like 20k + an engineer-month producing CCC as the actual flare being shot into the night that it is. Enough to make this penny ante shit about "hurr hurr they could've written a native app" asinine. They took a solid crack at GCC, one of the most complex things *made by man* armed with a bunch of compute, some engineers guiding a swarm, and some engineers writing tests. Does it fail at key parts? Yes. It is a MIRACLE and a WARNING that it exists at all? YES. Do you know what you would have with an engineer-month and 20k in compute trying to write GCC from scratch in 2 weeks in 2024? A whole heck of a lot less than they got. This notion that everything is the same just didn't make contact on 2025, and we're in 2026 now. All of software is already changing and HN is full of wanking about all the wrong stuff.
  - zamadatix 8mo ago
    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 coding agents.

jsheard 8mo ago

Likewise OpenAIs browser is still only available on macOS, four months after launch, despite being built on a mature browser engine which already runs on everything under the sun. Seems like low-hanging fruit, and yet...

crims0n 8mo ago
Probably has more to do with underwhelming adoption than anything else.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- no-name-here 8mo ago
  I'm guessing you're saying no one wants it? As otherwise, launching on an OS that has ~3% market share (on top of a cross-platform engine) will prevent the vast majority of adoption, yes.

nozzlegear 8mo ago

The Claude app is one giant garbanzo bean. I uninstalled it and pinned the web app to my dock instead.

ivankra 8mo ago

> For now, Electron still makes sense A few years ago maybe. Tauri makes better sense for this use case today - like Electron but with system webviews, so at least doesn't bloat your system with extra copies of Chrome. And strongly encourages Rust for the application core over JS/Node.

bigstrat2003 8mo ago
Electron has never made sense. It is only capable of making poorly performing software which eats the user's RAM for no good reason. Any developer who takes pride in his work would never use a tool as bad as Electron.
- Austizzle 7mo ago
  > in his work Women, however, are welcome to use electron

qudat 8mo ago

Code isn’t free when you have to review and QA it

Jackevansevo 8mo ago

Because Anthropic and the rest of them are lying to you about the sophistication of these tools. The fact that claude code is a still buggy mess is a testament to the quality of the dream they're trying to sell.

linsomniac 8mo ago
>claude code is a still buggy mess What bugs are you seeing? I use Claude Code a lot on an Ubuntu 22.04 system and I've had very few issues with it. I'm not sure really how to quantify the amount of use; maybe "ccusage" is a good metric? That says over the last month I've used $964, and I've got 6-8 months of use on it, though only the last ~3-5 at that level. And I've got fairly wide use as well: MCP, skills, agents, agent teams...
- rileymichael 8mo ago
  there's currently ~6k open issues and ~20k closed ones on their issue tracker (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues). certainly a mix of duplicates / feature requests, but 'buggy mess' seems appropriate
  - Maxious 8mo ago
    you can also judge for yourself based on the changelog https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELO... maybe we don't have AGI to prevent all bugs. but surely some of these could have been caught with some good old fashioned elbow grease and code review.

hparadiz 8mo ago

Write everything in C.

emporas 8mo ago

Not all code qualities are free. Good quality code, still expensive.

MoreQARespect 8mo ago
Youve been able to hire a dirt cheap Indian or fillipino living on poverty wages in those countries to knock out cheap crap for a long time.

yodsanklai 8mo ago

Because code isn't free. I can see it in my team. We've all been using Claude a lot for the last 6 months. It's hard to measure the impact, but I can tell our systems are as buggy as ever. AI isn't a silver bullet.

OsrsNeedsf2P 8mo ago
Why isn't Claude doing QA testing for you?
- slopinthebag 8mo ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcasm, but if not, you cant rely on the thing that produced invalid output to validate it's own output. That is fundementally insufficient, despite it potentially catching some errors.
  - _2d30 8mo ago
    Damn. Guess I'll stop QAing my own work from now.
    - Spivak 8mo ago
      I mean there is some wisdom to that, most teams separate dev and qa and writers aren't their own editors precisely because it's hard for the author of a thing to spot their own mistakes. When you merge them into one it's usually a cost saving measure accepting that quality control will take a hit.
    - meheleventyone 8mo ago
      Uh, yeah, thh hi is has been considered bad practice for decades.
    - ryan_n 8mo ago
      That is often how software development has been done the past several decades yea... Not to say that you don't review your own work, but it's good practice for others (or at least one other person) to review it/QA it as well.

greyman 8mo ago

But nobody says code is free(?). Certainly not Claude, that experimental compiler costs $20K to build. That openclaw author admitted in Lex Fridman talk that he spends $10k's on tokens each month.

littlestymaar 8mo ago
Anthropic being valuated $380B makes $20k practically free for all intent and purpose. Given how much they pay their developers, the Claud app probably cost at least 2, and likely 3, orders of magnitude more to build. If their AI could do the same for $2m they'll definitely do that any day.

dostick 8mo ago

If author tried native macOS development with agent for an hour, they wouldn’t know where to begin explaining how different is agentic web development from native. It was better year ago, you could actually get to build a native app. Now all models over-think everything, they do things they like and igniter hard constraints. They picked all that in training. All these behaviours, hiding mistakes, shameful silence, going “woke” and doing what they think should be done despite your wishes. All this is meliorated in web development, but for native it made it a lot worse. And visual testing, compare in-browser easy automated ride with retest-it-yourself for 50th time.

alexfromapex 8mo ago

I don't know why anyone uses Electron anymore, Tauri produces much smaller binaries and is amazing.

neodymiumphish 8mo ago
Agreed! I built a MacOS Postgres client with just Claude Code[1]. It could use some UI improvements, but it runs much better than other apps I’ve tried (specifically what it’s replacing for me: RazorSQL) and the binary is smaller than 20MB. 1: https://github.com/NeodymiumPhish/Pharos https://github.com/NeodymiumPhish/Pharos
- nicoburns 8mo ago
  It's not free, but Postico is excellent https://eggerapps.at/postico2 https://eggerapps.at/postico2
- lsaferite 8mo ago
  Tauri is still a WebView wrapped in some chrome, right? That's not what I would consider "native".
  - ivankra 8mo ago
    Eh, didn't even Microsoft give up and just shipped a React-based start menu at one point? The range of "native" on Windows 11 is quite wide - starts with an ancient Windows 3.1 ODBC dialog box.
  - neodymiumphish 8mo ago
    Yes. I’d prefer a native interface and have been working on that. I should change the readme until that’s complete.
torginus 8mo ago
I don't know why anyone uses Tauri - disk space is cheap but having to handle QA and supporting quirks for every possible browser engine the users' system could ship with certainly is not.

tpae 8mo ago

The framing here assumes you need to ship native to all 3 platforms to justify leaving Electron. You don't. I've been building a native macOS AI client in Swift — it's 15MB, provider-agnostic, and open source: https://github.com/dinoki-ai/osaurus https://github.com/dinoki-ai/osaurus Committing to one platform well beats a mediocre Electron wrapper on all three.

owenpalmer 8mo ago
Link gives 404
- tpae 8mo ago
  just fixed it
slopinthebag 8mo ago
Yeah, like you don't need to write three different clients. You can write a native MacOS client and ship your electron client for the irrelevant platforms.
Austizzle 7mo ago
As somebody who frequently switches between windows and Linux, I will pretty much never install an app that's only on one platform. Cross platform options mean I don't need to pay for or learn separate apps for the same thing on each OS I don't care if it's QT or a WebView or something else, I just want to lower friction for myself

mtimmerm 8mo ago

Claude code runs in the terminal, not Chromium. It's hardly an "electron app" at all. It's a nodejs app, and there is no reason to have a problem with that. Nodejs can wait for inference as fast as any native app can.

rlpb 8mo ago
> It's a nodejs app, and there is no reason to have a problem with that. Node apps typically have serious software supply chain problems. Their dependency trees are typically unauditable in practice.
slopinthebag 8mo ago
Aren't they talking about the desktop app though? Also I refuse to download and run Node.js programs due to the security risk. Unfortunately that keeps me away from opencode as well, but thankfully Codex and Vibe are not Node.js, and neither is Zed or Jetbrains products.
owenpalmer 8mo ago
They're not talking about Claude code
jdgoesmarching 8mo ago
Desktop app.

BoiledCabbage 8mo ago

Because Anthropic has never claimed that code is free? It's pretty easy to argue your point if you pick a strawman as your opponent. They have said that you can be significantly more productive (which seems to be the case for many) and that most of their company primarily uses LLM to write code and no longer write it by hand. They also seems to be doing well w.r.t. competition. There are legitimate complaints to be made against LLMs, pick one of them - but don't make up things to argue against.

vasco 8mo ago
Head of Claude Code at Anthropic 3 days ago: "Coding is largely solved" https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-...
- teemur 8mo ago
  I'm not sure coding has ever been the hard part. Hard part (to me) has always been to be smart enough to know what, exactly, I (or somebody else) want. Or has someone heard of a case when someone says something like "These requirements are perfectly clear and unambiguous and do not have any undefined edge/corner cases. But implementing that is still really hard, much harder than what producing this unicorn requirements spec was"?
  - oytis 8mo ago
    But they already know what they want, they have it. Rewriting it to be more efficient and less buggy should be the lowly coding that is supposed to be solved
oytis 8mo ago
Point still stands. If you are so much more productive and have some of the most expensive engineers in the world, why not write something decent
- throwaw12 8mo ago

mococa 8mo ago

Claude desktop really sucks, a monster on resource hog

dcchambers 8mo ago

Actual reason: there's far more training data available for electron apps than native apps. And despite what Anthropic and OpenAI want you to think, these LLMs are not AGI. They cannot invent something new. They are only as good as the training data.

wgbowley 8mo ago
Real.

tokenless 8mo ago

Code is cheaper but not free is why. Also AI is better at beaten path coding. Spend more tokens on native or spend them on marketing?

condiment 8mo ago

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 useful impact.

danny_codes 8mo ago
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.

atlgator 8mo ago

The cobbler's children have no shoes, but at least the cobbler's children aren't running three instances of Chromium.

harel 8mo ago

Here is what worries me the most at the moment: we're in a period of hype, fire all the developers, we have agents, everybody can code now, barrier is not low - it's gone. Great. Roll up a year from now, and we have trillions of lines of code no human wrote. At some point, like a big PR, the agent's driver will just say yes to every change. Nobody now can understand the code easily because nobody wrote it. It works, kinda, but how? Who knows? Roll up another few years and people who were just coding because it's a "job" forget whatever skill they had. I've heard a few times already the phrase "I didn't code in like 10 months, bruh"... Then what? Not saying I'm not using AI - because I am. I'm using it in the IDE so I can stay close to every update and understand why it's there, and disagree with it if it shouldn't be there. I'm scared to be distanced from the code I'm supposed to be familiar with. So I use the AI to give me superpowers but not to completely do my job for me.

CamperBob2 8mo ago
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...
- harel 8mo ago
  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...
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    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.
    - harel 8mo ago
      But Greek and Latin don't underpin our entire planet's infrastructure... Software does.

Keekgette 8mo ago

[dead]

llbbdd 8mo ago

This post and this entire thread are HN-sniping to the millionth degree. We have all the classics here: - AI bad - JavaScript bad - Developers not understanding why Electron has utility because they don't understand the browser as a fourth OS platform - Electron eats my ram oh no posted from my 2gb thinkpad

ra0x03 8mo ago
My guy if you can’t see the problem with a $300B SF company that of course claims to #HireTheBest having a dumpy UX due to their technical choices I don’t really know what to tell you. Same goes for these companies having npm as an out-of-the-box dependency for their default CLI tools. I’m going to assume anyone who thinks that every user’s machine is powerful enough to run electron apps, or even support bloated deps hasn’t written any serious software. And that’s fine in general (to each their own!), but these companies publicly, strongly, claim to be the best, and hire the best. These are not small 10 people startups.
- selridge 8mo ago
  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?
  - rustystump 8mo ago
    Bun exists and building a ui on too of that should be well within the power of the money they have. No one is saying to rebuild the universe but the current state is embarrassing.
    - selridge 8mo ago
      Yeah but what does the statement refute? We can all talk about how this or that app should be different, but the idea is "electron sux => ????? " Why should I care that they didn't rebuild the desktop app I don't use. Their TUI is really nice.

goodquestions 8mo ago

Ho is Claude?

cpeterso 8mo ago

Or they could write native client apps using Qt to handle that “last 10%” of native app polish.

robertoandred 8mo ago

I really hope React Native’s support for Mac and Windows apps takes off. The benefits of Electron without Chromium, plus native controls/functions.

PunchyHamster 8mo ago

The garbage one is now indeed essentially free

zamadatix 8mo ago

The use of "Free" in the title is probably too much of a distraction from the content (even though the opening starts with an actual cost). The point of the article does not actually revolve about LLM code generation being $0 but that's what most of the responses will be about because of the title.

khalic 8mo ago

Probably the same reason _teams_ is a js app, money

bcherny 8mo ago

Boris from the Claude Code team here. Some of the engineers working on the app worked on Electron back in the day, so preferred building non-natively. It’s also a nice way to share code so we’re guaranteed that features across web and desktop have the same look and feel. Finally, Claude is great at it. That said, engineering is all about tradeoffs and this may change in the future!

blibble 8mo ago
this is you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We7BZVKbCVw if that's the case, why don't you just ask it to "make it not shit"?
- kenonet 8mo ago
  hahaha
- runlevel1 8mo ago
  I'm not sure what's more insane: That they're willing to make those claims or that companies are willing to downsize based on them.
- afroboy 8mo ago
  Like Warren Buffett said, Never ask your barber if you need a haircut.
PKop 8mo ago
Users would benefit from native apps, hopefully you guys will give it a try. I bet Claude would be great at it too, no?
deleted 8mo ago
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endergen 8mo ago
The second you wanted to add a webview, you want Electron. Devs want Chrome DevTools and Chrome runtime. You guys just did add it too, so yeah!

lateforwork 8mo ago

> Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine. The minimum app size is usually a couple hundred megabytes. I only see these complaints on HN. Real users don't have this complaint. What kind of low-end machines are you running, that Chromium engine is too heavy for you? > They are often laggy or unresponsive. That's not due to Electron. > They don’t integrate well with OS features. If it is good enough for Microsoft Teams it is probably good enough for most apps. Teams can integrate with microphone, camera, clipboard, file system and so on. What else do you want to integrate with?

jmalicki 8mo ago
Both electron is too heavy for you, and the other non-Electron overhead of Claude is fine.
hodgehog11 8mo ago
I agree with your counterpoint to OS integration, but Microsoft Teams is infamous for not being "good enough" otherwise. Laggy, buggy, unresponsive, a massive resource hog especially if it runs at startup. It's gotten a bit better, but not enough. These are not complaints on HN, they're in my workplace. Not everyone is running the latest and greatest hardware, very few actually have the money for that. If you're running hardware from before this decade, or especially the early 2010s, the difference between an Electron app and a native app is unbelievably stark. Electron will often bring the device to its knees.
cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
A single Electron app is usually not a problem. The problem is that the average user has a pile of Chrome tabs open in addition to a handful of Electron apps on top of increasingly bloated commercial OSes, which all compound to consume a large percentage of available resources. This is particularly pertinent on bulk-purchased corporate and education machines which are loaded down with mandated spyware and antivirus garbage and often ship with CPUs that lag many years behind, and in the case of laptops might even have dog slow eMMC storage which makes the inevitable virtual memory paging miserable.
RachelF 8mo ago

antirez 8mo ago

Cluade is an Electron app because this is a cultural issue, not a technological one. Electron could make sense if you are a startup with limited development force. For big companies that want to make a difference, to hire N developers and maintain N native apps is one of the best bet on quality and UX you can do, yet people don't do it even in large companies that have the ability, in theory, to do it. Similarly even if with automatic programming you could do it more easily, still it is not done. It's a cultural issue, part of the fact that who makes software does not try to make the best possible software anymore.

_pdp_ 8mo ago

Code is not and will never be free. You pay for it one way or another. It will take a couple of years for things to cool down to realise that there is more to software than writing the code. But even if AI can write all the code - who is going to understand it. Don't tell me this is not needed. RTFM is what gives hacker the edge. I doubt any company want to be in a position where they simply have no clue how their main product actually works.

astrostl 8mo ago

The quality of the ChatGPT Mac app is a major driver for me to keep a subscription. Hotkeys work, app feels slick and native. The Claude Mac app I found so poor that I'd never reach for it, and ended up uninstalling it — despite using the heck out of Claude Code on a Max plan — because it started blocking system restarts for updates.

tom1337 8mo ago

I don't care wether its electron or not but the now ship a full vm with Claude which not only takes 15 GB of storage but also uses so much memory even though I just use chat. Why does that even need to be started?

wtetzner 8mo ago
Especially now that they've made RAM so expensive.

Kiro 8mo ago

LLMs are best at JavaScript.

dude250711 8mo ago
Which happens to be the majority of code they had stolen.
- Kiro 8mo ago
  Yes, so Electron is naturally the best target for any LLM.

hacker_homie 8mo ago

Because it's the most popular & flexible cross platform user space compositor: - unlike QT it's free for commercial use. - I don't know any other user land GUI toolkit/compositor that isn't a game engine(unity/unreal/etc).

WD-42 8mo ago
Why does it need to be cross platform? If code was free there would be a native app for each platform using its respective toolkit, not QT.
- hacker_homie 8mo ago
  Well they wanted it to be cross plat because more users. clearly the code isn’t free and writing for raw win32 is painful.
mkl 8mo ago
Qt is LGPL, so free for commercial use in most situations.
- hacker_homie 8mo ago
  There are rules when using the lgpl version of qt, the kde foundation has an exception I think. https://www.qt.io/development/open-source-lgpl-obligations https://www.qt.io/development/open-source-lgpl-obligations

fassssst 8mo ago

Because it doesn’t matter. The biggest AI apps of last year were command line interfaces for cripes sake. Functionality and rapid iteration is more important. If only AI had more Liquid Glass, lol

internet2000 8mo ago

I bet it's because of Windows idiosyncrasies.

deleted 8mo ago

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tigoo 8mo ago

electron is comprehensive. maybe claude is not there yet. ecosystem still important

486sx33 8mo ago

[dead]

Robdel12 8mo ago

Heh, I felt the same. I'm a web dev but I do not want a electron app. We can do better, I used to write electron apps because I wasn't able to build a proper native app. Now I can! I've been building a native macOS/iOS app that lets me manage my agents. Both the ability to actually control/chat fully from the app and to just monitor your existing CLI sessions (and/or take 'em over in the app). Terrible little demo as I work on it right now w/claude: https://i.imgur.com/ght1g3t.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/ght1g3t.mp4 iOS app w/codex: https://i.imgur.com/YNhlu4q.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/YNhlu4q.mp4 Also has a rust server that backs it so I can throw it anywhere (container, pi, etc) and the connect to it. If anyone wants to see it, but I have seen like 4 other people at least doing something similar: https://github.com/Robdel12/OrbitDock https://github.com/Robdel12/OrbitDock

wycx 8mo ago

I have been getting claude to us free pascal/lazarus to write cross-platform (linux qt & gtk, windows and cocoa) apps as well as porting 30-year old abandoned Windows Delphi apps to all three platforms using precisely because I can end up with a small, single binary for distribution after static linking. I hope that prevalence of AI coding agents might lead to a bit of a revival of RAD tools like lazarus, which seem to me to have a good model for creating cross-platform apps.

wzdd 8mo ago

The gotcha style "if AI is so good, why does $AI_COMPANY's software not meet my particular standard for quality" blog posts are already getting tedious.

deleted 8mo ago

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waynesonfire 8mo ago

Because coding is not the hard part.

pipeline_peak 8mo ago

Tldr nailing down all the edge cases

Liftyee 8mo ago

Why is no one admitting that even though resources like RAM, CPU, etc. are plentiful nowadays, they should still be conserved? Computers have gotten orders of magnitude faster since 2016, but using mainstream apps certainly don't feel any faster. Electron and similar frameworks do offer appealing engineering tradeoffs, but they are a main culprit of this problem. Sure, the magnitude of RAM/compute "waste" may have grown from kB to MB, but inefficiency is still inefficiency - no matter how powerful the machine it's running on is.

namegulf 8mo ago

Your post already clearly covers the reason. It is easy to crank out a one-off, flashy tool using Claude (to demo its capabilities), which may tick 80% of the development work. If you've to maintain it, improve, grow for the long haul, good luck with it. That's the 20% hard. They took the safe bet!

game_the0ry 8mo ago

Electron is a good choice for native-like desktop apps, even with the downsides. Yes, feel free to downvote me.

pessimizer 8mo ago

I assume it's because LLMs are overrated and trash so they chose something that was easy for lazy developers, but I'm probably just cynical. You would think with programming becoming completely automated by the end of 2026, there'd be a vibe coded native port for every platform, but they must be holding back to keep us from all getting jealous.

MontyCarloHall 8mo ago

I am curious how much Claude Code is used to develop Anthropic's backend infrastructure, since that's a true feat of engineering where the real magic happens.

felixrieseberg 8mo ago

Hi, Felix here - I'm responsible for said Electron app, including Claude Code Desktop and Claude Cowork. All technology choices are about trade-offs, and while our desktop app does actually include a decent amount of Rust, Swift, and Go, but I understand the question - it comes up a lot. Why use web technologies at all? And why ship your own engine? I've written a long-form version of answers to those questions here: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/why-electron https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/why-electron To us, Electron is just a tool. We co-maintain it with a bunch of excellent other people but we're not precious about it - we might choose something different in the future.

sarchertech 8mo ago
Let’s ignore electron. Your app has many UI/UX and performance flaws. If as your CEO says “coding is largely solved”, why is this the case? Or is your CEO wrong and coding is not largely solved?
- phist_mcgee 8mo ago
  What kind of project lead is going to answer for their CEO?
  - sarchertech 8mo ago
    Not a normal one but also a normal project lead doesn’t get on HN and start publicly answering questions. If you’re gonna start speaking for and defending your company though and your company CEO has made asinine statements that are related, I’m gonna ask.
- selridge 8mo ago
  APP BAD! If coding SOLVED HOW COME APP BAD.
  - incognition 8mo ago
    this compiles on my machine

yibers 8mo ago

Look at their backlog...

jongjong 8mo ago

Because JavaScript is the best for the application layer. We just have to accept that this is reality. AI training sets are just full of JS... Good JS, bad JS... But the good JS training is really good if you can tap into it. You just have to be really careful because the agent can easily slip into JS hell; it has no shortage of that in its training.

adamtaylor_13 8mo ago

As many have pointed out, code is not free. More than that, the ability to go fast only makes architectural mistakes WORSE. You'll drive further down the road before realizing you made the wrong turn. A native app is the wrong abstraction for many desktop apps. The complexity of maintaining several separate codebases likely isn't worth the value add. Especially for a company hemorrhaging money the way the Anthropic does.

eviks 8mo ago

> The resulting compiler is impressive, given the time it took to deliver it and the number of people who worked on it, but it is largely unusable. That last mile is hard. You're easy to impress, that explains the unrealistic expectations "on the surface". That's some strange analogy, though, basic usability is the first mile, not the last. Coming back to the frameworks and apps, the last mile would be respecting Mac unique keyboard bindings file for text editing. First mile is reacting to any keyboard input in a text field. Same with the compiler, basic hello world fail isn't the last mile.

umairnadeem123 8mo ago

[dead]

sujee 8mo ago

Claude should have gone for native apps and demonstrated that it is possible to do anything with their AI. I'm currently building a macOS AI chat app. Generally SwiftUI/AppKit is far better than Web but it performs bad in few areas. One of them is Markdown viewer. Swift Markdown libraries are slow and lacks some features like Mermaid diagrams. To work around this, some of my competitors use Tauri/Electron and few others use WKWebView inside Swift app. Initially I tried WKWebView. Performance was fine and the bridge between JS and Swift was not that hard to implement but I started seeing few problems especially due to the fact that WebView runs as separate process and usually a single WebView instance is reused across views. After few attempts to fix them, I gave up the idea and tempted to go fully with Web rendering with Tauri but as a mac developer I couldn't think about building this app in React. So I started building my own Markdown library. After a month of work, I now have a high-performance Markdown library built with Rust and TextKit. It supports streaming and Markdown extensions like Mermaid. Most of the code was written by Claude Opus, and some tricky parts were solved by Codex. The important lesson I learned is that I’m no longer going to accept limitations in tech and stop there. If something isn’t available in Swift but is available in JS, I’m going to port it. It’s surprisingly doable with Claude.

SomeUserName432 8mo ago
> Claude should have gone for native apps and demonstrated that it is possible to do anything with their AI. Using IntelliJ I actually find myself wishing for an integrated webview of Github Copilot. The native view is absolutely terrible, jumping up and down non stop.

wraptile 8mo ago

This is such a litmus test for a tool that "in few months will be writing 90% of all code". If a multi-billion dollar bleeding edge company can't use Claude Code to create and maintain a native GUI then no one else stands a chance.

TrailingArbutus 8mo ago

Why do people hate Electron???? Like, VSCode, Cursor, whatsapp like hello? fast dev and flexibility > over optimized native stuff.

marcelox86 8mo ago
It is so disingenuous to mention the whatsapp electron client and not pretend its a slow turd. or maybe your comment is sarcasm and i just can’t notice it

cyrusradfar 8mo ago

OT: I use Tauri exclusively for apps these days when I'm building and it's specular. Never going back.

hfriedrich 8mo ago

Interesting perspective on the tradeoffs. I've been exploring the opposite end of this spectrum — I built a C#/WPF app that uses LLM APIs to generate fully native desktop applications from prompts at runtime. Think Canvas or Claude Code artifacts, but the output is compiled WPF with actual native controls, not a web view. The app handles NuGet dependency resolution on the fly, catches runtime errors and feeds them back to the model for self-correction, and can export standalone executables (WPF for Windows, Avalonia for cross-platform). Everything is self-contained — users don't need to install any SDKs, IDEs, or toolchains. I'm a teacher, not a startup founder, and I've been trying to market this commercially without much luck. Seriously considering open-sourcing the whole thing. Would love to hear what people here think about the native-vs-web approach for AI-generated applications. Happy to do a quick demo if anyone's curious.

throw_rust 7mo ago

Code is free but some code is freer than others.