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Comment by legostormtroopr | Hacker News Reader

But if AI can maintain code bases so easily, why does it matter if there are 3? People use electron to quickly deploy non-native apps across different systems.

Surely, it would be a flex to show that your AI agents are so good they make electron redundant.

But they don’t. So it’s reasonable to ask why that is.

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No, it is completely unreasonable to ask why a company is not putting three times the resources into solving a problem than one times the resources.

What resources? it's supposedly a solved problem. Anthropic just needs to spend tokens.

Are tokens not resources?

Not to Anthropic

How so?

But the one times the resources didn't solve the problem, clearly, since we are talking about it. And they claim that AI makes it trivial to port to do this sort of things so it would not be 3x the resources.

1. Anthropic has no problem burning tens of thousands of dollars of tokens on things that have zero real-world value, such as implementing a C compiler that as far as I can tell they don't intend to be used in the real world - for example, they announced it on Feb 5, promising "Over the coming days, I’ll continue having Claude push new changes if you want to follow along with Claude’s continued attempts at addressing these limitations" but there have been zero code commits since Feb 5 (the day they announced it). Wouldn't it make far more sense for a company to invest tokens into their own product than burning them for something that may be abandoned within hours of launching, with zero ongoing value to their company or their customers?

2. Why do you think it requires "three times the resources" - wouldn't it normally be an incremental amount of work to support additional targets, but not an additional 100% of work for each additional target?

> But if AI can maintain code bases so easily, why does it matter if there are 3? People use electron to quickly deploy non-native apps across different systems.

Because then their competition would work faster than they could and any amount of slop/issues/imperfections would be amplified threefold.

Also there would inevitably be some feature drift - I got SourceTree for my Mac and was surprised to discover that it's actually somewhat different from the Windows version, that was a bit jarring.

I hope that in the next decade we get something like lcl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library), but for all OSes and with bindings for all common languages - so we don't have to rely on the web platform for local software, until then developing native apps is a hard sell.

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