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0 pointsthewebguyd22d ago0 comments

> 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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pelagicAustral22d ago

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.

thewebguydOP22d ago

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

elxr22d ago

I have been seeing more and more native desktop apps in the past few months (octarine for instance), but most of them would've honestly been better off as web-apps, or at least a polished electron app.

> seems to be hostile to any AI generated code at all for now.

Because the majority of vibe-coded apps are low effort.

rajatkulk21d ago

Octarine dev here! Unfortunately the app doesn't work for the web given the architectural decisions.

Also the app's been around for over 3 years now, and isn't vibe coded (since I saw it in this thread around vibe coding apps).

Open to any feedback if you've been using it for a while

elxr21d ago

Yup, I know it's been around for longer, probably wasn't the best example. But it's just the first native app I've thought of and with how much it's been changing, it constantly feels new.

I do like most of it, but the pace of upgrades is a bit too fast for me compared to obsidian, which feels more stable for now. There's also parts of the obsidian editor (the plain-text view, I never use preview mode) that just feels better than every other notes app I've tried so far. Although obsidian as a whole is something I'm also trying to move off of.

Love the polish of octarine though. Has the revenue been decent so far?

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