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by twalichiewicz10 hours ago |
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upvoteby pelagicAustral8 hours ago|
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I took a few shots at building desktop apps with Tauri, Wails and Electron using Claude Code, and the results were not very good at all. In fact, they were by far the worst results I've gotten with the tool. I can easily clone one of my boilerplate repos in Rails, or Django and prompt away, and the results are consistently good, as in, functional MVP in a few hours. This was never the case for the desktop tools I mentioned.

This looks like a highly specialized tool for desktop that actually works. I watch the demo and I am assuming the apps are actually made with some kind of technology a la Tauri, or Electron, thus making the apps cross-platform.

I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.

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upvoteby thewebguyd8 hours ago|
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> I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.

I hope it's not a lost battle, tbh. I was hoping with AI & Vibe Coding we'd see sort of a resurgence of native first desktop apps, but so far it's just all been a continuation of the web app & web tech hegemony.

Maybe not for Windows as their native GUI story is a lost cause now, but for sure macOS and I had hopes of it leading to a renaissance of desktop linux apps in GTK instead of electron, but that (the Linux) community seems to be hostile to any AI generated code at all for now.

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upvoteby elxr2 hours ago|
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I have been seeing more and more native desktop apps in the past few months (octarine for instance), but most of them would've honestly been better off as web-apps, or at least a polished electron app.

> seems to be hostile to any AI generated code at all for now.

Because the majority of vibe-coded apps are low effort.

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upvoteby pelagicAustral8 hours ago|
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Well, to be fair, I do have an experience working on a Windows Forms app from scratch. App connects to a very specific scanner via customs drivers and makes use of a remote API for data tasks. The app works, it's stable, but I'm not going to lie, AI assisted coding for this particular stack does require a very large amount of nurturing, it is just not the same experience you get with web apps. Nevertheless, it did it.
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upvoteby thewebguyd7 hours ago|
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Makes sense. There's plenty of freely available code and data online for using web tech. Any number of free online bootcamps spawned in the mid 2010s are full of "Become a React developer in 6 months" type of content.

Native, especially on Windows and macOS, have been the domain of proprietary apps there's not much code outside of tutorials online to train a model on outside of official documentation.

I made a couple of small menu bar utilities for mac using Gemini, and it was OK at best. Kept wanting to use deprecated APIs, but with a lot of handholding I got them to work.

Would be neat to see Apple put out their own model specifically for Swift/SwiftUI

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upvoteby rev_vehicle5 hours ago|
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I’ve had a totally different experience. I’ve coded 3 different Tauri apps and 1 Wails app with Claude Code and it was some of the easiest work I’ve done with AI assisted coding. That said, the local features that Rust is handling in the Tauri app is not anything heavy, just moving files around, some regex matching, and some SQLite stuff. All of the headache I had in these apps was the React frontends and Node issues. The Rust features all worked pretty much first try every time.
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upvoteby mcintyre19948 hours ago|
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They say they're targeting Mac only for now, so it could be native code, or they could just have not tested/refined their prompt for other platforms yet.

> This was never the case for the desktop tools I mentioned.

I'd be curious how well Claude Code works for a native Swift app on macOS, if that's the platform you're on. I've found it extremely good at iOS apps so my guess is it would be equally good at building a native macOS app with the same stack.

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upvoteby Ronsenshi7 hours ago|
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I've tried using Codex and ChatGPT while working on a small SwiftUI app. It's not very good when it comes to newer APIs and features - I imagine due to lack of data about these things. Very often it would rather push something AppKit-based instead of SwiftUI.

It works, but feels really janky and messy.

I had one very annoying bug with file export API where extra view on export window would appear with a delay. No matter what I tried it didn't manage to fix it. Instead it would go on to try and completely rewrite whole file export class in various ways... which still didn't work as it claimed it would. Ended up fixing it manually by caching instance view locally.

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upvoteby azinman24 hours ago|
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Why not use SwiftUI or whatever is native to the platform?
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upvoteby tshaddox10 hours ago|
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> Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it.

Well yeah, isn’t that criticism we’ve had every LLM wrapper for years now? “Show me the prompt!” But that doesn’t mean these types of products are useless.

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upvoteby mcintyre19948 hours ago|
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> If anything they do background processes better since you can send a very long task off to a server and shut off your computer, come back later and pick up where you left off.

I think it's fair to say that's a benefit of web apps over native apps in many cases. But for the kind of business app use case they're talking about, it's also a tradeoff. I can imagine a lot of business apps where you don't want to send the data to the server of a Replit etc. and doing all the processing local is a benefit.

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upvoteby varun_ch10 hours ago|
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A big thing would be API requests/browser automation. Web apps can’t do that without a backend proxy due to CORS
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upvoteby nateb202210 hours ago|
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> Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it.

My feeling is that it's intended for a less-technical audience than Claude Code.

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upvoteby twalichiewicz10 hours ago|
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I can certainly see that. If they really did manage to make some really effective design tooling, would be a great candidate for an MCP server.
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upvoteby general_reveal3 hours ago|
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You mean “fork” other apps.
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upvoteby jeroenhd10 hours ago|
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> Pretty sure modern web apps can do all of those

If you're on Chrome and give them permission, or stuff them into Electron and friends, they can. The workflow isn't as smooth as with native applications, though.

On the other hand, the web browser does protect you from some of the risks this essentially "trust me bro" curl2bash-as-a-service product inherently comes with.

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