[the_lucifer]

> Proprietary platform-specific software has had its day.

If the purported benefits of agentic-coding systems are real, it should have been trivial for Anthropic to implement a native macOS application, and sell it as a benefit, no? The whole reason Electron was being pushed is because it reduces development effort, but AI should be able to nullify it based on Anthropic's own messaging.

[alwillis]

> If the purported benefits of agentic-coding systems are real, it should have been trivial for Anthropic to implement a native macOS application, and sell it as a benefit, no?

Absolutely. But there's the support, documentation and testing aspect and how they're setup.

To their credit, OpenAI acquired a team of experienced macOS developers when they bought Sky [1], the basis for the Mac version of Codex. Apple acquired Workflow from the same team years ago, which became Shortcuts, a core part of macOS's automation system.

Anthropic says 80% of their code is written by Claude; the remaining 20% requires some human expertise, especially with platform-specific features.

A native macOS version of Claude Desktop (and therefore Claude Cowork) would be a huge step forward for Anthropic. Hopefully it's a matter of when, not if.

[1]: https://www.macstories.net/news/sky-acquired-by-openai/

[benoau]

There's still a lot of cognitive overhead adjacent to the code that grows with each platform you're supporting, because you're still having to QA and debug and build and run tests and review code changes in multiple languages with wildly different tooling and dependencies.

AI has to get these native builds perfect for each platform whereas with Electron it's like... write once run anywhere evolves into perfect it once, perfect it everywhere.