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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 do

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.
- selridge 8mo ago
  the central argument to the piece is still fundamentally silly. What truly do we know about the organization that produced the Claude desktop app, by virtue of the fact that they built it in electron? Really truly what do we know about them based on that decision? I submit the answer is basically nothing. Instead, we’re sort of coasting on priors and vibes about “native” tool kits being better. And that’s just catnip for people on the Internet who want to talk shit about code and don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. If native is a stand in for better in your mind and you conclude that they made a choice that was worse because it’s not native then therefore you can conclude that they are bad somehow. But the connective tissue there is not whatever they’re designing choice is (and of course we have no vision into the actual choices). It’s the un-investigated prior. That native is good and cross platform is bad. That’s really what people are arguing in this thread. And the only reason we don’t see that is completely fucking ridiculous is because we are also interested in talking about how AI is bad. So everyone gets to have two bites of the cookie and nobody gets to defend an actual argument. It’s so silly that I don’t think that we can claim that the piece is actually much more moderate and subtle than everyone is reading it to be. Because that’s kind of a dastardly position too. It allows the main argument to be advanced, and whenever it is questioned, one can retreat to claims of nuance. Instead, let’s just say that it’s silly.
  - zamadatix 8mo ago
    I think it's silly we have to judge what the article is saying by how it's argued in the HN comments, especially on something divisive where many comments react to the conclusions they made when they saw the title. The article doesn't go as far as saying Electron is bad or judge Anthropic based on their use of it. It says Electron has downsides which are dramatically outweighed by the upsides and then shows that calculus remains true (i.e. the benefits of Electron still outweigh any of the potential downsides) even when using LLMs as coding agents. The article is not setting out to ridicule anything, it's investigating why Electron is still a good choice in the coding agent use case by looking at one such app (the Claude desktop app) written very close to home for coding agents as an example. About the only thing the article can be said to ridicule at all is that the Claude app is slow and buggy (which is accurate IMO) but it's never saying that to imply it's impossible to solve that because it's an Electron app or that it means one should not use coding agents. The rest of the article really stands to state quite the opposite. As the article concludes, it is a pro-Electron usage pro-coding-agent piece. I.e. that the Claude desktop app is written in Electron is NOT evidence either Claude or Electron must be bad: > For now, Electron still makes sense. Coding agents are amazing. But the last mile of dev and the support surface area remains a real concern. That last mile is where the author places the problems, and they had placed them there regardless whether one uses Electron or coding agents, so it's hard to take it as a hit piece for those two things.
    - selridge 8mo ago
      I mean the article is pretty short. And what it implies presents itself in the subtitle! It opens with a "fact" (a link to the author's own tweet) which says: "The state of coding agents can be summed up by this anecdote: Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app." We haven't made it 100 words in and we already have the core claim. In case we missed it, the author puts it in an inset later: >So why are we still using Electron and not embracing the agent-powered, spec driven development future? We get to the end where the author says: "For now, Electron still makes sense. Coding agents are amazing. But the last mile of dev and the support surface area remains a real concern." That's both true and and misleading. It's misleading because we can all agree with this sober-minded concluding statement and forget it's just based on "Electron bad, native good". The real logical sequence the author needs us to follow is: Anthropic said code is free now. > Native code is harder than that for a cross platform runtime > Anthropic releases an app on a cross-platform runtime > code must not be free. That is only true iff there's absolutely no other design tradeoff! Did they pick electron because robots are bad at the last mile? Maybe. It's pretty dubious, given the MANY MANY other people who made electron apps before AI could code. It's also not at all clear "native good, electron bad" is true at all. It reminds me STRONGLY of "jQuery bad / native good" which was also groundless.

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.

selridge 8mo ago
the central argument to the piece is still fundamentally silly. What truly do we know about the organization that produced the Claude desktop app, by virtue of the fact that they built it in electron? Really truly what do we know about them based on that decision? I submit the answer is basically nothing. Instead, we’re sort of coasting on priors and vibes about “native” tool kits being better. And that’s just catnip for people on the Internet who want to talk shit about code and don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. If native is a stand in for better in your mind and you conclude that they made a choice that was worse because it’s not native then therefore you can conclude that they are bad somehow. But the connective tissue there is not whatever they’re designing choice is (and of course we have no vision into the actual choices). It’s the un-investigated prior. That native is good and cross platform is bad. That’s really what people are arguing in this thread. And the only reason we don’t see that is completely fucking ridiculous is because we are also interested in talking about how AI is bad. So everyone gets to have two bites of the cookie and nobody gets to defend an actual argument. It’s so silly that I don’t think that we can claim that the piece is actually much more moderate and subtle than everyone is reading it to be. Because that’s kind of a dastardly position too. It allows the main argument to be advanced, and whenever it is questioned, one can retreat to claims of nuance. Instead, let’s just say that it’s silly.
- zamadatix 8mo ago
  I think it's silly we have to judge what the article is saying by how it's argued in the HN comments, especially on something divisive where many comments react to the conclusions they made when they saw the title. The article doesn't go as far as saying Electron is bad or judge Anthropic based on their use of it. It says Electron has downsides which are dramatically outweighed by the upsides and then shows that calculus remains true (i.e. the benefits of Electron still outweigh any of the potential downsides) even when using LLMs as coding agents. The article is not setting out to ridicule anything, it's investigating why Electron is still a good choice in the coding agent use case by looking at one such app (the Claude desktop app) written very close to home for coding agents as an example. About the only thing the article can be said to ridicule at all is that the Claude app is slow and buggy (which is accurate IMO) but it's never saying that to imply it's impossible to solve that because it's an Electron app or that it means one should not use coding agents. The rest of the article really stands to state quite the opposite. As the article concludes, it is a pro-Electron usage pro-coding-agent piece. I.e. that the Claude desktop app is written in Electron is NOT evidence either Claude or Electron must be bad: > For now, Electron still makes sense. Coding agents are amazing. But the last mile of dev and the support surface area remains a real concern. That last mile is where the author places the problems, and they had placed them there regardless whether one uses Electron or coding agents, so it's hard to take it as a hit piece for those two things.
  - selridge 8mo ago
    I mean the article is pretty short. And what it implies presents itself in the subtitle! It opens with a "fact" (a link to the author's own tweet) which says: "The state of coding agents can be summed up by this anecdote: Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app." We haven't made it 100 words in and we already have the core claim. In case we missed it, the author puts it in an inset later: >So why are we still using Electron and not embracing the agent-powered, spec driven development future? We get to the end where the author says: "For now, Electron still makes sense. Coding agents are amazing. But the last mile of dev and the support surface area remains a real concern." That's both true and and misleading. It's misleading because we can all agree with this sober-minded concluding statement and forget it's just based on "Electron bad, native good". The real logical sequence the author needs us to follow is: Anthropic said code is free now. > Native code is harder than that for a cross platform runtime > Anthropic releases an app on a cross-platform runtime > code must not be free. That is only true iff there's absolutely no other design tradeoff! Did they pick electron because robots are bad at the last mile? Maybe. It's pretty dubious, given the MANY MANY other people who made electron apps before AI could code. It's also not at all clear "native good, electron bad" is true at all. It reminds me STRONGLY of "jQuery bad / native good" which was also groundless.