Elevator Pitch

• Even with powerful coding agents, Electron remains practical because the “last mile” of native development and ongoing cross-platform support is still costly and fragile.

Key Takeaways

• Electron’s bloat and performance drawbacks are often outweighed by the simplicity of maintaining one cross-platform codebase.
• Coding agents can accelerate the first ~90% of implementation from a clear spec and test suite, but struggle with edge cases and long-term stability.
• Shipping truly native Mac/Windows/Linux apps multiplies bug surface area and maintenance burden, making Electron a rational tradeoff today.

Most Memorable Quotes

• “Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app.”
• “Electron apps are bloated; each runs its own Chromium engine.”
• “The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities… New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.”