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Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

hey, I have a question for any product managers who are in charge of making decisions re: rebuilding app UI in Electron, like 1Password with their entire app, Adobe with their dialog boxes, Windows with their Start Bar (!#@!$!)

My understanding was that the proposition of Electron is that it’s there's some cross-platform advantages, also it’s basically easier and you can hire a junior dev to wing it.

My understanding of AI is that you can just tell a junior dev to vibe it.

So can't you turn your AI’s on making native UI via vibe apps? Shouldn't that be really easy for any idiot, and also performant?

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Not a product manager but I habitually try to play devil's advocate as one. I think it's popularity, full stop. You _could_ vibe code a native app no problem - but then you're targeting one set of hardware. If you're already just vibing it, why not make something that will work cross-platform while you're at it? And if an LLM is prompted with that, they'll usually go with the popular choice: web app on Electron.

There are plenty of cross platform options. I write with Qt for example.

Yes but Qt comes with the drawbacks of being tied to Qt.

With Electron + React, you'd be able to rip out any components you need and place them in other web apps. The browser is (psychologically) avoiding vendor dependencies to a greater degree than other options.

You are tied to web and react. You can substitute react for something else (I suppose) but still tied to that.

I know of a few other cross platform toolkits if you don't like Qt, but in all cases you quickly become tied to it.

Okay, but Windows isn't cross-platform.

Adobe is but they have a ginormous multi-decade codebase that mastered cross-platform UI ages, an LLM coding assistant ought to be able to "add a range input here using our standard UI library" much more easily than "rebuild this with Electron."

1Password at least has a decent excuse for a rotten decision.

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