Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

None of this matters anymore.

We have LLMs.

It's easy to build native everything now without much resource expenditure.

Android will be Kotlin. iOS will be Swift. Desktop and server will be Rust. Web will be TypeScript / React for now, but maybe one day WASM.

LLMs are the target now.

View on HN

Yet, neither ChatGPT desktop app nor Claude Code CLI is native. Mind you these are made by companies with practically infinite tokens.

These apps predated LLMs "getting good".

Both have an enormous number of paying customers and you don't just disrupt that for a language change.

Anthropic literally rewrote the whole runtime CC is based on in another language. And even then they still not dared to migrate it away from React.

Zig -> Rust is straightforward and is a good advertisement for their model.

React -> Rust is ambitious and the models aren't there yet.

Soon.

FYI I've been building an app, Android first, and discovered the magic of Kotlin Multiplatform. The LLM modularized everything so that it's substantively the same code base, but with Swift only where it's needed. Still working through it, but it seems like a great and underrated platform to build on.

You're not emitting the code yourself anymore. The platform ease of use for humans no longer matters as much (if at all).

Preference for a native feel, solid software, bugfree code, compile/develop velocity, LLM friendliness.

We're in a brand new world.

I'm building an app that targets Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux. There's no way I'm going to be maintaining 5 different codebases, even with LLMs.

This is one of those “oh gosh” posts at first glance, then you actually think about it, and it’s 100% correct. Python, Node exist to save the precious commodity of developer time. Once that’s no longer precious, best value comes from purified custom Rust, no attack surface from huge libraries, optimized performance for the specific task on all possible hardware.

Windows desktop native is WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK, for better or for worse. No amount of Rust and tokens will recreate everything you get out of the box with that stack. Native needs to feel native.

The last time Windows UI felt native was maybe Windows XP. Maaayyybe 7, if we are generous. It also has to do with sluggish or no feedback by UI widgets, due to the trend of flat everywhere.

not sure why you're getting downvoted. but if you're building even very popular applications, it is quite easy to see how LLMs are very well suited for this type of consistency job.

- they follow instructions quite well.

- are tireless at doing mechanical ports between languages and frameworks.

- Can understand a new ecosystem quite well.

I didn't downvote but I'd expect downvotes for a completely unnuanced thought terminating cliche that ignores everything in the thread. AI fanaticism doesn't help but lots of people don't get downvoted for that alone.

Then why aren't people doing that? Microsoft has as much access to cheap tokens as any software company around, right, so you'd think they would be leading the way.

I'm sure these things are in the plans from upper management.

we'll know when the next layoffs hit.

they probably are but have some patience.

Keep in mind, claudecode and the other coding agents were pretty bad until around Jan of this year (2026). So it's only been about 9 months since devs have had decent coding agents and even less time has elapsed since somewhat wide adoption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com