Boris Cherny on Trying to Get Claude Code to Rewrite the Claude App

John Gruber:

It’s not like the problem with the current Claude Mac client is merely the technical detail that it’s written with a bloated non-native framework. The actual problem is that it’s a poorly designed app written with a bloated non-native framework. The design itself is non-native. And aside from ignoring most Mac UI idioms, it’s just a bad design in the abstract. It’s bad on the web, bad on Windows, and thus of course it’s also bad on the Mac. So pointing Claude Code at the current Electron app and directing it to recreate it in Swift — pixel-by-pixel — could at best solve only the technical problems with the current app, not the design problems. I’d be more likely to use Claude if it were well designed but still written using Electron, than if it were ported to AppKit and/or SwiftUI but with exactly the current design.

This!

Right now in software, engineering is running the asylum which means they think engineering work will solve all the problems. But what engineers need are the other disciplines.

If you had a crappy website in Next.js and you switched to vanilla JS, that won’t solve the design problems of your website, e.g. accessibility problems, copywriting problems, interaction problems, etc. We need the other disciplines. We need each other.