Comment by scosman
3 hours ago
LLMs do change the tradeoff if you can now ship cross platform apps quickly, without electron.
GPUI is one example: some of the downsides of electron (UI is not native), but it solves memory and performance side, and shared codebase.
Just writing native apps because LLMs makes it cheaper is the other option. Shopify did this after years of react native.
> you can now ship cross platform apps quickly, without electron.
The opposite is also true. My argument is that you can also ship Electron apps with more features more quickly with LLMs.
You still have a finite token budget. With native apps, you have to split those tokens across multiple platforms, whereas with Electron, you can reuse most of the code.
Big companies have been going back and forth between native and cross-platform approaches even before LLMs. They generally have the resources (humans, tokens, compute) that small and medium-sized companies don’t have. So I’d take their rationale with a grain of salt.
Why assume finite token budgets? Scaling 2x tokens isn’t a major jump if it brings quality.
Also the GPUI approach is still finite tokens, just better stack.
Because any kind of budget, resources are always finite? 2x the tokens roughly translates to 2x the cost. That’s a pretty big ask. Quality alone, unfortunately, isn’t always enough to justify it. There has to be business value too.