[trollbridge]

Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.

[JumpCrisscross]

It shows Anthropic doesn’t trust its agents to write native apps. That cuts cleanly against its marketing.

And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.

[threatofrain]

Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team. The failure to make a good native app is a business decision. Claude or not, leadership could've snapped their fingers, allocated the budget, and fixed the frontend UX by now if it were important enough.

[jefftk]

> Anthropic being a big company means they could trivially hire an iOS team

Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).

[trollbridge]

… can’t they just fire up Claude Code and prompt “port this app to iOS”?

I’m only half joking here

[cmrdporcupine]

It just seems like Anthropic has made a deliberate choice to make themselves a TypeScript dev shop.

From Claude Code being written in React (!!) to acquiring the Bun people so they they could have their very own bespoke JS/TS runtime (and then... rewriting the whole thing), to having the CC "native" app being Electron, etc.

It just seems like it comes down to a choice at the highest level to hire people from a "full stack" background, and build in and and prioritize TypeScript as their dev language, for better or for worse.

I personally think it's worse and that shows in the performance and quality of CC, but I'm biased.

Codex, FWIW, is written in Rust, and it is by far snappier and more reliable, though less featureful for now.

[keeda]

Interestingly I just skimmed through a video linked in TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlGRN8jh2RI and Boris Cherny explains that they chose TypeScript and React for Claude Code primarily because it was "on distribution" and the models back then just weren't good enough at other languages.

So it's interesting that Codex is written in Rust. Amongst other things it could mean OpenAI had more powerful models that could handle Rust, or their engineers had to handhold the agents a lot more up front, or Rust has structural advantages that could overcome being less represented in the training data.

[cmrdporcupine]

Codex also I think put its first version out a bit later?

IMHO building the agent harness at least partially by hand is kind of key? I think going hogwild with "vibe coding" the actual harness is partially why CC is a bit of a rats nest. I think it's genuinely gotten out of control in terms of their ability to reason about it. Just my opinion, I'm sure Boris disagrees.

Also Codex itself distributed via NPM same as Claude. But it distributes a compiled Rust binary. Which is compiled from open source.

[keeda]

I used to think Claude Code was released much earlier too, and my initial theory was that OpenAI as a follower had the benefit of more powerful models... but when I looked it up, Codex was first released in April 2025 [1], whereas CC Beta was released in Feb 2025 [2] -- only a couple of months apart!

I'm sure each lab is keenly aware of what the other is doing (how else could they time so many of their releases so close to each other?) so it's highly probable they started developing each app about the same time, and likely even knew the technical details involved. Which is why it's additionally interesting that OpenAI started off with Rust while CC used Electron.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-debuts-codex-cli-an...

2. https://github.com/jqueryscript/anthropic-claude-timeline

[mnicky]

Well, Codex came long after Claude Code, no? So at that time the situation with models and Rust support was probably already different...

[seabrookmx]

I don't understand why people care about Electron? Evaluate the quality of the software based on its own merits IMO. VS Code, Slack, Postman, Obsidian.. I use this software every day and my only complaint is Slack's RAM usage (which honestly has no negative effect on my machine, but just seems silly for a messaging app).

Claude is a buggy mess because it's slop, not because it's electron. Heck, it runs a full Linux VM under the covers without asking.. it's insane.

[JumpCrisscross]

> don't understand why people care about Electron?

Most Electron apps are crap because they transparently communicate the developer prioritizing their own efficiency over the trade-offs to UX choosing a cross-platform platform entails.

In most cases, I don’t care that an app looks crappy as long as it works. For Anthropic, however, the irony undermines its argument that Claude is ready to replicate developers.

[rumori]

Native apps suck too. i cannot list 10 native mac apps that are truly great, including Apple’s own. To me these days native on desktop means web, not Appkit. I can resize the whole interface with a common shortcut, I can select text trivially, native Mac apps constantly fail to do both. Developing native apps for the Mac is a mess, with immature SwiftUI, the absolute garbage liquid glass is on the desktop, the outdated Appkit framework and iOS based Mac Catalyst. Electron is a sane choice and good enough for Figma, Slack, Notion, leading apps in their respective categories.

[seabrookmx]

It's not any better on the other OS' either. MS hasn't had a sane native app strategy in a decade and the GTK/QT divide remains on Linux.

[trollbridge]

Electron apps (or web based apps) tend to chew up RAM and otherwise be slow, which is a problem these days when computers now come with 8GB of RAM.

[wqaatwt]

Yet… VS code somehow became the most popular IDE that happens to be generally viewed favorably by most of its users.

I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)

[beAbU]

VS code came out just as Atom was gaining traction in the more-than-a-text-editor-but-also-not-a-full-fat-ide market.

After testing vs code for a bit everyone realized what hot shit Atom was and jumped ship.