Comment by OlympicMarmoto

This is another common excuse.

You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/

You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc

"native" is used for different things, from "use the platform's default gui toolkit" to "compile to a machine code binary". the former is a bit of a mess, but the latter is strictly better than wrapping a web view and shipping an entire chrome fork to display and interpret it. just write something in qt and forget about native look and feel, and the performance gain will be enough to greatly improve the user experience.

microsoft also uses react native for the start menu and also bricked that during a recent upgrade apparently... along with breaking other stuff.

As I outlined in a sibling comment. You can still use React and your JS developers. Just don't ship a whole browser with your app.

May be an app that is as complex as Outlook needs the pixel-perfect tweaking of every little button that they need to ship their own browser for exact version match. But everything else can use *system native browser*. Use Tauri or Wails or many other solutions like these

That said, I do agree on the other comments about TUIs etc. Yes, nobody cares about the right abstractions, not even the companies that literally depend on automating these applications

Do not give a shit about how they excuse doing a bad job. If their tools make them that much more productive, and being the developer of those tools should allow you to make great use of them.

Use native for osx Use .Net framework for windows Use whatever on Linux.

Its just being lazy and ineffective. I also do not care about whatever "business" justification anyone can come up with for half assing it.

This. Even Linux is nasty. Qt and GTK are both horrible messes to use.

It would be nice if someone made a way to write desktop apps in JavaScript with a consistent, cross-platform modern UI (i.e. swipe to refresh, tabs, beautiful toggle switches, not microscopic check boxes) but without resorting to rendering everything inside a bloated WebKit browser.

I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary.

A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens.

Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days.

[1] https://wails.io/

Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!

Given that OpenAI managed to single-handedly triple the price of RAM globally, people will very much care about their chat application consuming what little scraps are left over for them, even if they don't know enough about anything to know why their system is running poorly.

TUI is easy to train on, but hard to use for users. Part of the reason it’s easier to have LLMs use a bunch of Unix tools for us is that their text interface is tedious and hard to remember. If you’re a top 5% expert in those tools it doesn’t matter as much I guess but most people aren’t.

Even a full-featured TUI like Claude Code is highly limited compared to a visual UI. Conversation branching, selectively applying edits, flipping between files, all are things visual UI does fine that are extremely tedious in TUI.

Overall it comes down to the fact that people have to use TUI and that’s more important than it being easy to train, and there’s a reason we use websites and not terminals for rich applications these days.

I agree. I like using Claude or Codex in VM on top of the tmux. Much more flexibility that way. I open a new tmux window for each issue/task big enough to warrant it, issue a prompt to create a worktree and agents and let them go to town. I actually use claude and codex a the same time. I still get observability because of tmux and I can close my laptop and let them cook for a while in yolo mode since the VM is frequently backed up in proxmox pbs. I am a retired hobbyist but this has been a nice force multiplier without devolving a complete viby mess. I hope these new orchestration tool support this like vs code remote development does. Same for cloud. I want them to support my personal "cloud" instead of laggy github mess.

It would be cool if I didn't have to worry about whether I was "in" or "out" of the AI TUI. Right now, I need at least two terminals open: One running my shell, that I use to issue shell commands, and one running Claude, where I can't. It would be nice if it could just be my shell, and when I wanted to invoke claude, I'd just type:

   c Do this programming task for me.

Doesn't have to be. I just revived one of my C++ GLFW app from 2009. Codex was able to help me get it running again and added some nice new features.

I guess you get an Electron app if you don't prompt it otherwise. Probably because it's learned from what all the humans are putting out there these days.

That said.. unless you know better, it's going to keep happening. Even moreso when folks aren't learning the fundamentals anymore.

I've done way, way more than that, as I'm sure others have too.

This is just bad product management.

Claude code is perfectly capable of writing low level rendering and input code and it can be equally as mindless as vibe coding web apps.

E.g. just say "write a c++ gui widget library using dx11 and win32 and copy flutters layout philosophy, use harfbuzz for shaping, etc etc"

At the end of the day LLMs just reproduce the consensus of the internet, so it makes sense that a coding agent would spit out software that looks like most of what's on the internet.

LLM output is called slop for a reason.

Because you see stuff before you decide what to invoke?