Using Electron in this day and age shows a particular lack of effort, considering how easy it is to use an agent harness to build native versions of apps. I mean, we're a tiny little business and we somehow find the bandwidth to do it.
And if the Electron app were flawless, that would be one thing. It isn’t. It’s buggy, feature light, constantly updating and slow.
Anthropic is primarily limited by how fast they can identify and onboard people who will be a good fit. Allocating that to ios would trade off against allocating that staffing growth elsewhere (ex: reliability, making the next generation model even better).
I’m only half joking here
From Claude Code being written in React (!!) to acquiring the Bun people so they they could have their very own bespoke JS/TS runtime (and then... rewriting the whole thing), to having the CC "native" app being Electron, etc.
It just seems like it comes down to a choice at the highest level to hire people from a "full stack" background, and build in and and prioritize TypeScript as their dev language, for better or for worse.
I personally think it's worse and that shows in the performance and quality of CC, but I'm biased.
Codex, FWIW, is written in Rust, and it is by far snappier and more reliable, though less featureful for now.
So it's interesting that Codex is written in Rust. Amongst other things it could mean OpenAI had more powerful models that could handle Rust, or their engineers had to handhold the agents a lot more up front, or Rust has structural advantages that could overcome being less represented in the training data.
IMHO building the agent harness at least partially by hand is kind of key? I think going hogwild with "vibe coding" the actual harness is partially why CC is a bit of a rats nest. I think it's genuinely gotten out of control in terms of their ability to reason about it. Just my opinion, I'm sure Boris disagrees.
Also Codex itself distributed via NPM same as Claude. But it distributes a compiled Rust binary. Which is compiled from open source.
I'm sure each lab is keenly aware of what the other is doing (how else could they time so many of their releases so close to each other?) so it's highly probable they started developing each app about the same time, and likely even knew the technical details involved. Which is why it's additionally interesting that OpenAI started off with Rust while CC used Electron.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/openai-debuts-codex-cli-an...
2. https://github.com/jqueryscript/anthropic-claude-timeline
Claude is a buggy mess because it's slop, not because it's electron. Heck, it runs a full Linux VM under the covers without asking.. it's insane.
Most Electron apps are crap because they transparently communicate the developer prioritizing their own efficiency over the trade-offs to UX choosing a cross-platform platform entails.
In most cases, I don’t care that an app looks crappy as long as it works. For Anthropic, however, the irony undermines its argument that Claude is ready to replicate developers.
I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)
After testing vs code for a bit everyone realized what hot shit Atom was and jumped ship.