Why is Claude an Electron app?

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because coding is not the hard part.

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.

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.

Electron is a good choice for native-like desktop apps, even with the downsides.

Yes, feel free to downvote me.

Nailed it.

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

Write everything in C.

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...

Ho is Claude?

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Tldr

nailing down all the edge cases

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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.