Because CSS is constantly changing, inconsistently implemented, and difficult to use, it can't easily be targeted by widget engines (although Qt has tried, and maybe others) and web browsers already exist, so webview environments like Electron are the quickest way to get a cross-platform installable application that can also be hosted on a web server. I wouldn't really call it native though.
But the point is: LLMs should make it easy to generate a native UI for each of the main platform's UI frameworks. GTK should no longer be needed.
I can fly at 100mph if I let AI run loose and with a bit of steering I can get it to output what I'm looking for and generally pass verification and tests.
If I care about the code though, and I want to keep it maintainable, the amount of time and tokens I need to spend correcting and iterating on the output quickly eats through much of the initial time I saved, to the point where I'm unsure if I'm actually saving much time at the end of the process.
With hobby projects I lean on quality more, and the async nature of AI also makes this much easier to make progress without needing my full attention to do so.
In the corporate world, there's both the pressure to accelerate with AI, but also maintain code and product quality. The dials of one way or the other are more obvious now, but I don't believe it's possible to do both with the current models and harnesses without exponential cost.
What is interesting though, is I'm now leaning towards faster models rather than smarter ones.
Intelligence lets me bite off larger chunks of work at once, and trust the model to behave without having to watch it intensely, but doesn't seem to drive down the number of iterations required to hit my desired quality.
Faster models means the iterations I'll have to go through regardless will complete much faster and gets me closer to a proper flow state. Models will keep improving, but maybe we're getting near "smart enough" and the race will pivot to performance > intelligence.
At home I stopped reviewing the code for my mobile app, and I do not feel this has affected maintainability.
With 150k LOC, the AI still performs changes as easily as it did three months ago, when I started the project.
If anything, the new models made it easier.
When I read all those posts from people advocating a very hands-on, understand each line approach, I speculate many come from a position like me at work or have never seriously tried 'vibecoding' a large project from scratch with SOTA models.
People routinely post that things I work on for 30 hours/week are impossible.
No, we built Electron because there are a huge number of people who are too lazy to learn anything outside of HTML/etc for creating a UI. It's not actually hard to make a UI using the native desktop frameworks.
We built Electron because web devs were a dime a dozen. It was an economic decision, not a technical one.