codeinabox, codeinabox@programming.dev

Agreed though the article has this disclaimer:

Before we dive into the code, I think it’s worth pointing out that the goal is largely to be immersive and expose some lore. I think this design and effect fit because of the theme and because it’s not for critical content. My point is that it’s just an aesthetic component for a game that makes this acceptable — I don’t think this is necessarily a good user experience for your every day website where there are stakes.

Though that quote is followed by this, which indicates at least five of those vulnerabilities were real:

I searched the Linux kernel and found a total of five Linux vulnerabilities so far that Nicholas either fixed directly or reported to the Linux kernel maintainers, some as recently as last week:

Your comment reminded me of this article, The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address, which discusses the lack of technical leadership when it comes to tackling technical debt, and that the solution is usually a rewrite.

Instead, most organisations don’t tackle technical debt until it causes an operational meltdown. At that point, they end up allocating 30–40% of their budget to massive emergency transformation programmes—double the recommended preventive investment (Oliver Wyman, 2024).

I have noticed the repository lacks CONTRIBUTING.md. If you want to set some rules about contributing, I would have added them there, instead of creating a Markdown file specific for agents. I’m very much of the philosophy that you should write documentation for humans, which has the added bonus that it will also be consumed by agents.

I agree but it depends on how teams create and refine their tickets. For example, you could have high level tickets, and someone picks one up and creates an implementation that’s not an appropriate fit for your architecture.

Thank you for not assuming my motivations. Could you please elaborate on what you mean by “oneshotted”? I share a lot of articles, so I’m not surprised you recognise my username.

I don’t specifically seek them out. I follow quite a few different programming blogs, and I am just sharing what people are posting about, and it just so happens a lot of people are posting about this topic.

Headless does not mean “no screen anywhere.” It means you are not required to use the company’s app or site to finish the job.

You might say: “Book a flight and a hotel in Tokyo.” A helper (with hooks into services, e.g. MCP or other agent APIs) talks to airlines and hotels for you. You might never see their homepage or their “join our club” popup.

Whilst I can see where the author is going with this, I can’t see some tasks, particularly booking concert tickets, being done by AI agents. Whilst it may be convenient for end users, it’s also open to exploitation by scalpers.

If you’re going to make that claim, could you please provide some evidence.

I think you’re misconstruing the author’s argument, at no point does the author imply that Claude knows best, or that Electron apps are better. Their closing argument is certainly not an endorsement for Electron or AI slop.

Don’t get me wrong: writing this brings me no joy. I don’t think web is a solution either. I just remember good times when native did a better-than-average job, and we were all better for using it, and it saddens me that these times have passed.

I just don’t think that kidding ourselves that the only problem with software is Electron and it all will be butterflies and unicorns once we rewrite Slack in SwiftUI is not productive. The real problem is a lack of care. And the slop; you can build it with any stack.

Imagine being such a slop-brainwashed fanboi

Do you have any evidence for this? Looking through the post, and the author’s other blog post titles, there is very little mention of AI or Claude.

Instead of throwing labels at the author, it’s much more worthwhile to discuss their key argument about the challenges of developing native apps.

I wonder if we’ll end up in a situation of open source projects with closed source tests. Though I don’t know how that would work, because how would you contribute a new feature if the tests are closed? 🤔

Check against Can I Use, all of the APIs, except for the following are supported by major browsers: - Synchronous Clipboard API only Safari has full support, the rest have partial - Temporal only currently supported in Chrome and Firefox

The fact that people even bring javascript as the backend is a bit crazy to me.

To clarify do you mean replacing JavaScript just on the backend? This article is about using JavaScript on the front end.

I’m intrigued, what would you replace it with?

There are some really good tips on delivery and best practice, in summary:

Speed comes from making the safe thing easy, not from being brave about doing dangerous things.

Fast teams have:

• Feature flags so they can turn things off instantly
• Monitoring that actually tells them when something’s wrong
• Rollback procedures they’ve practiced
• Small changes that are easy to understand when they break

Slow teams are stuck because every deploy feels risky. And it is risky, because they don’t have the safety nets.

I think there’s many solutions to this, including setting a minimum account age to accept pull requests from, or using Vouch.