I visited https://claude.ai/ over a mobile tethered connection from my laptop the other day and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it loaded.

(That said, I just had a look in Firefox and it loads 20.78 MB of JavaScript (6.84 MB compressed) so I expect they could make it a bunch lighter if they kept trying.)

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mwcampbell 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I doubt that they could iterate from where they are to an optimal solution though. What would have gotten them there more reliably is a development culture that would have found it disgusting to even consider shipping that much JS in the first place. And I don't buy the "then they never would have shipped at all" argument in this case, because, unlike the case of shipping cross-platform desktop apps before Electron, we did ship plenty of web apps, including interactive chat-shaped apps, before it became easy to unthinkingly ship a JS bundle that big.

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brazukadev 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> so I expect they could make it a bunch lighter if they kept trying.

What is preventing a 1T dollars company from "keep trying"? What did they "kept trying" that got them to ship a webapp with 21mb of JavaScript?

This is a failure of their software engineering culture. Keep trying the same thing will keep doubling their JS, not halving it. That's the effect of incompetence + LLM reliance.

I wouldn't expect any better from a company that uses nextjs and React for their cli/TUI.

	▲	simonw 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, culture. I expect most of the web developers at Anthropic are of the generation that considers 21MB of JavaScript a perfectly reasonable way to build a web app.