Definitely not a developer machine based on how they presented it in google IO. So if you write software, it's not looking like it'll be relevant whatsoever. I hope to be proven wrong.
Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?
> Why would I build my little web-apps and backends in the cloud when I can run things faster locally?
Because the company that designed and built your Chromebook made that the easy path.Because in a lot of companies, your machine is actually just a portal to a remote desktop.
Not the first time an incumbent has four aces in hand and appears to be entirely unable to make anything of it.
> and if there are lessons to draw from that
Lesson 1: doing shit is hard
Lesson 2: money rules so milking the cow wins over taking the slightest risk
If you are, obviously you need the VM.
I use Claude Code CLI myself (inside a VM, to isolate it from the host) for >90% of my needs. For the remaining fraction - email scours, cloud drive searches, other third-party connections - the desktop application is surprisingly decent. I don't even have more than half a dozen connectors enabled. In the VM I have separate, personally managed access tokens available for various third-party services. Wouldn't really try to maintain more than 5-6, otherwise it gets too confusing. [ß]
The desktop application mostly Just Works[tm] with SSO. At least when M365 doesn't suffer from their 4-times-a-day auth outage.
ß: A lot of APIs and authentication systems were designed in the stone age. You either need a 1:1 permissioned access token that can do horrendous damage, or you deal with ultra-granular, confusing and ill-designed scoping jungle where nothing makes sense. Atlassian, I'm looking at you especially. At least an MCP server, provisioned with a reasonably done service account, doesn't have all of your powers to get things wrong with.
The answer is probably as simple as "no one thought not to do that."
---
I know different people work on these things so I can't do more than guess about how engineering culture cuts across teams, but given the sheer amount of carelessness and sloppiness in Anthropic's software I have to imagine they're burning investor money in training and inference because the code to do it is as bad as the rest of their software.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1rlc71n/claude_de...
What major cross platform app isn't based on Electron or Tauri? Slack, Discord, VS Code, Teams, Notion...
I did consider experimenting with the Routines feature on the desktop app, but I'm leaning towards whipping together something with cron. I saw another poster here who has a daily PR summary routine that I think would be handy, as I have quite a few repos where I'm a sporadic contributor but would like to keep tabs.
The web app is definitely a bit of a problem. IF there is a native app on desktop or if claude cli is much faster, i haven't tried them.
But I almost always think of things from a talent-pool-first perspective. Perhaps there are actual technical issues like what Boris was referring to.
They are releasing at breakneck pace, it's pretty funny how vibed their products feel sometimes
Because they're vibe-coded ultra sloppy code. And it really shows.
Mythos, Fable, please do the thing with the VM. Make no mistakes.
It seems like the VM is a core part of how you use the application.
My agent harness spins up a VM too, but it spins up on demand, cools down in 10 minutes and warms up when I focus back on the app.
The files it works on actually lives in a mount.
People take more time to type a prompt than the VM takes to spin up on a fast machine and on a slow machine, the cooldown naturally frees RAM back to the machine.
I would have assumed almost everyone would get a Mac/Linux computer to use coding agents because Unix is their "native" platform. It's Bash tool calls all the way down.
Does anyone know a source for reliable data on what coding agent apps devs are using? How many are using Code Claude CLI vs Claude Desktop, etc?
I want tools that meet me where I’m at, not tools that demand I change up my entire UX to interact with them.
The assumption is not “what’s wrong with Windows that it doesn’t work with <technology>,” more “what’s wrong with <technology> that it doesn’t work with Windows”
Why wouldn’t you want your thing to be cross platform
Currently "Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it"
Should be "Claude Desktop spins up a VM with no way of stopping it"
/s