Drew Breunig questions why Claude uses Electron despite spending $20k on a C-compiler agent swarm in Rust. The answer isn't that LLMs aren't good enough yet - it's that native apps have nothing compelling to offer anymore. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors actively discourage native development through restrictive policies and poor tooling.

Native apps lost the API battle to web apps years ago. The argument that native provides better integration falls apart when examining modern computing. File formats aren't interoperable, services moved to the web, and OSes failed to create good shared baselines. You can integrate with OS calendars but not web calendars - and doing so is actually easier on the web. Performance arguments also don't hold up; there's no technical reason why Slack needs 80MB to show basic messages.

Native UI consistency died in the late 2000s. These days, native looks as inconsistent as the web, if not worse. Apple places UI elements by "vibes" rather than guidelines, and platform aesthetics change too frequently. The real problem isn't Electron - it's a lack of care and the willingness to ship sloppy software regardless of the technology stack.