Comment by darkwater
8 hours ago
Exactly my thoughts! I was expecting a Rust app written from scratch available at least in Qt and GTK flavors , and maybe with a third and a fourth option.
Don't they have agent swarms with infinite tokens?
8 hours ago
Exactly my thoughts! I was expecting a Rust app written from scratch available at least in Qt and GTK flavors , and maybe with a third and a fourth option.
Don't they have agent swarms with infinite tokens?
They replaced a pretty decent native Swift Mac app (with only some chronic state management bugs), weighing ~100MB ish, with the Codex app that most people don't need, made in Electron, which takes minimum 5GB+ including filesystem cruft. Today I ran into a memory leak that froze the app and made the Renderer process take 5GB, then 10GB of RAM.
That was after I asked it to only touch 3 text files in its working directory, after which it sparked macOS permission prompts to access my Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and other apps' data. Thank god for the web platform and web apps.
"Thank god for the web platform and web apps."
They can be amazing. But you can write shitty code in them like anywhere else.
Browsers fundamentally chew on RAM for breakfast.
AIUI the reason is, "we", collectively even though we don't all work on them, optimize browsers for speed above almost all else. Then, when all the advertising websites on the internet consume all that speed, we can't go back and have to optimized for speed even harder. All that optimizing for speed ends up consuming lots of RAM, from all the images, the speed-optimize DOM with lots of cross-linking, the JIT and its generation of native code paths, the endless layers of caches, etc. etc. at every point where a browser can choose between RAM and speed it will choose speed unless it's just impossible to choose it for some reason.
So even if you write good code in Electron, it still tends to eat resources like candy.
On the plus side, if you write good code, you will pick up all those optimizations too, which is not necessarily all bad. Running something like VSCode at all is a powerful testament to the browser ecosystem now. IDEs do a lot of very heavy duty lifting and need a lot of performance to do all their work. But you can imagine that when the same text rendering system that enables all that fancy & fast syntax highlighting and all the other decorations and features in the editor window is used to display a preview of a markdown file that said preview is probably going to eat way more RAM than your instincts may have guessed.
But they're strictly sandboxed and won't muck up my local filesystem.
What! They replaced the native mac app with this?!
> They replaced a pretty decent native Swift Mac app (with only some chronic state management bugs), weighing ~100MB ish, with the Codex app that most people don't need, made in Electron.
Not even a $1T dollar company wants to maintain a native Swift Mac app even though they have AI models to build native apps for every platform.
Maybe they thought Electron would save them tokens to build the feature once and it works everywhere rather than spending more tokens on building the same feature on 3 platforms.
Works everywhere except Linux for a long time.
What better way to showcase their tools capabilities than to deliver apps that are native, efficient, and integrate well with the host system? By compromising with Electron and making mediocre, bloated software they are signaling that they just aren't there yet.
It would be like Ford buying Hondas for their company cars. It might save them money but it sends the wrong message.
1 reply →
Maybe they are drinking their own kool-aid, resulting in less then optimal choices and worse software for everyone and everything
I hate the new app aswell but you can still get the old one called ChatGPT Classic. Just scroll down to the bottom of the download site.
Its unmaintained and has glaring bugs (cant adjust thinking level) for a month now
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It’s apple fault that swift and swift ui is completely garbage.
I have already created a croos-platform solitaire game in Rust with Opus 4.5. Done in one evening. I absolutely do not understand why OpenAI could not write a proper application in 6 months. Do they struggle to use the product they sell?
I am thinking about this too. I mean they have access to the highest level models and still they just produced a garbage.
They probably just don't see it worth the extra effort. And maybe they want to keep it in sync with the web UI.
It definitely is a fraction of the work these days to maintain three different desktop apps + two different mobile apps + a web app. But it's still a lot more work than an Electron app that is merely tweaked between platforms.