I took a few shots at building desktop apps with Tauri, Wails and Electron using Claude Code, and the results were not very good at all. In fact, they were by far the worst results I've gotten with the tool. I can easily clone one of my boilerplate repos in Rails, or Django and prompt away, and the results are consistently good, as in, functional MVP in a few hours. This was never the case for the desktop tools I mentioned.

This looks like a highly specialized tool for desktop that actually works. I watch the demo and I am assuming the apps are actually made with some kind of technology a la Tauri, or Electron, thus making the apps cross-platform.

I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.

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rev_vehicle 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve had a totally different experience. I’ve coded 3 different Tauri apps and 1 Wails app with Claude Code and it was some of the easiest work I’ve done with AI assisted coding. That said, the local features that Rust is handling in the Tauri app is not anything heavy, just moving files around, some regex matching, and some SQLite stuff. All of the headache I had in these apps was the React frontends and Node issues. The Rust features all worked pretty much first try every time.

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thewebguyd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.

I hope it's not a lost battle, tbh. I was hoping with AI & Vibe Coding we'd see sort of a resurgence of native first desktop apps, but so far it's just all been a continuation of the web app & web tech hegemony.

Maybe not for Windows as their native GUI story is a lost cause now, but for sure macOS and I had hopes of it leading to a renaissance of desktop linux apps in GTK instead of electron, but that (the Linux) community seems to be hostile to any AI generated code at all for now.

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pelagicAustral 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, to be fair, I do have an experience working on a Windows Forms app from scratch. App connects to a very specific scanner via customs drivers and makes use of a remote API for data tasks. The app works, it's stable, but I'm not going to lie, AI assisted coding for this particular stack does require a very large amount of nurturing, it is just not the same experience you get with web apps. Nevertheless, it did it.

	▲	thewebguyd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Makes sense. There's plenty of freely available code and data online for using web tech. Any number of free online bootcamps spawned in the mid 2010s are full of "Become a React developer in 6 months" type of content. Native, especially on Windows and macOS, have been the domain of proprietary apps there's not much code outside of tutorials online to train a model on outside of official documentation. I made a couple of small menu bar utilities for mac using Gemini, and it was OK at best. Kept wanting to use deprecated APIs, but with a lot of handholding I got them to work. Would be neat to see Apple put out their own model specifically for Swift/SwiftUI

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mcintyre1994 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They say they're targeting Mac only for now, so it could be native code, or they could just have not tested/refined their prompt for other platforms yet.

> This was never the case for the desktop tools I mentioned.

I'd be curious how well Claude Code works for a native Swift app on macOS, if that's the platform you're on. I've found it extremely good at iOS apps so my guess is it would be equally good at building a native macOS app with the same stack.

	▲	Ronsenshi 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've tried using Codex and ChatGPT while working on a small SwiftUI app. It's not very good when it comes to newer APIs and features - I imagine due to lack of data about these things. Very often it would rather push something AppKit-based instead of SwiftUI. It works, but feels really janky and messy. I had one very annoying bug with file export API where extra view on export window would appear with a delay. No matter what I tried it didn't manage to fix it. Instead it would go on to try and completely rewrite whole file export class in various ways... which still didn't work as it claimed it would. Ended up fixing it manually by caching instance view locally.