Comment by tkcranny

11 hours ago

I’ve stopped using Claude on the desktop, just because of how slow the app is to start up and interact with. It’s an absolute clunker; I’m mystified why they can’t ship something that works well given their rhetoric about ai.

21 comments

tkcranny

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inigyou  10 hours ago

They vibecoded it, and admitted as much. Once it was able to self-vibecode, that's all they did. That's why it's written in React and uses gigabytes of RAM as a chat client.

  • fasterik  10 hours ago

    Not only did they decide to write a terminal application in React, but it's 500K lines of code. It's strange because I'm sure Claude is capable of writing a decent TUI in C. It says a lot about the engineering culture at Anthropic, at least on the software side.

    • comboy  9 hours ago

      Oh, a nice subthread place to vent. Their CLI is so f tragic that it is ridiculous. It keeps scrambling the terminal, scroll and basic shortcuts keep breaking, I've used so many tuis and terminal apps and many of them are a single man operation and a side project and I have never seen anything so bad.

      If I didn't know from experience that directed properly claude can be powerful, knowing that they used it to create that CLI would be instant runaway based on very reasonable heuristics - if they are not able to use their product to create a decent piece of software that is not even sophisticated then it seems futile for me to try.

      I just do not understand. I feel like most HN could vibe code better claude CLI in claude than the CLI (and certainly just write one) than what we have to deal with to use subscription.

      1 reply →

    • didericis  9 hours ago

      Had to make a decision for a TUI I'm working on and opted for curses rather than something like textual. If I wasn't using an LLM to do some of the plumbing I'd probably have used textual to avoid the inconvenience.

      There's a lot of opportunity to leverage LLMs to make codebases less bloated and less reliant on complex but human user friendly dependencies that not many people seem to be taking advantage of.

  • jubilanti  10 hours ago

    You say that as if somehow the trend for cross platform desktop apps to be ridiculously bloated bundles of browser overlays is new?

    What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri? Slack, Discord, VS Code, Teams, Notion...

    • dvngnt_  10 hours ago

      Though one would hope that they could leverage their advanced models to create native software per platform that can perform better.

    • inigyou  10 hours ago

      Claude Code is uniquely stupid in that it uses React to power a non-Electron terminal app.

    • skydhash  6 hours ago

      > What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri?

      Calibre, VLC, all the jetbrains suite, Sublime, Unity, Unreal, CodeBlocks, Adobe’s stuff,…

dbalatero  11 hours ago

I thought they were all in on agentic coding? They are probably just building at a surface level with only an eye towards shipping, without considering the impact of all the changes. I've seen less and less coordination between engineers as well under that model. If that's the case (Claude Code is this way). it is sort of what you get, no matter the rhetoric about "make sure to review all your changes!" It's always trade offs.

seabrookmx  10 hours ago

I'm with you. I have the Claude web app pinned as a PWA for quick queries, and then use the CLI for everything project-based.

I did consider experimenting with the Routines feature on the desktop app, but I'm leaning towards whipping together something with cron. I saw another poster here who has a daily PR summary routine that I think would be handy, as I have quite a few repos where I'm a sporadic contributor but would like to keep tabs.

jf  11 hours ago

I uninstalled it because I have no need for Claude Desktop and there’s no way to keep the 10+ GiB VM image off of my machine

SpaceManNabs  10 hours ago

It is surprising that the Claude web app lags pretty easily when using either chromium or firefox on ubuntu linux. Chats that delay my laptop work without issues on my ipad or iphone using the app.

The web app is definitely a bit of a problem. IF there is a native app on desktop or if claude cli is much faster, i haven't tried them.

  • what  9 hours ago

    All of the LLM web interfaces have serious lag when typing after a few turns, at least on iOS safari. I’m talking seconds to start rendering input after typing or when it needs to line wrap the input.