Yeah a few of those projects have existed for a while, but certainly things have picked up steam with the emergence of better LLMs. The issue with third-party clients is that Discord doesn't like them, and you're in violation of their ToS, meaning they can ban your account at any time. A bit risky, if you're networked into a bunch of communities (unfortunately so, but the effect is rather strong).

Have you considered zed instead? What does this offer that zed doesn't?

The diff viewing experience in zed is really polished IMO.

How come it's presented as paid software when the binaries are available on GitHub?

Also naming your company "__slop" is a bold move!

Consistent UI and control. I re-wrote my electron app in Swift. Its great. But... some of the UI is weird at times; weird patterns; weird behavior. And Apple's UI framework is one of the better ones. Even for AI, each platform will have its own quirks and just _finding_ them takes real users to expose. We take it for granted how flexible and powerful browser UI is, because there's so much baggage and performance related factors. But many UI frameworks are worse, and historically always were.

I think what we're seeing here - and likely to continue to see - is new versions of web UI that eschew a lot of the historical baggage given they don't need to support older websites. And possibly something more powerful. So I guess re-writes or partial ports that take only the parts we need. Presumably a bunch of people will try and hopefully, a few succeed.

I am not a developer, but using this type of frameworks and toolkits means that a lot of useful (and sometimes "boring") things are already thought through and taken care of. This is probably most important for smaller projects and teams, but some of it probably applies to Discord scale operations as well :)

While you _should_ put some effort into tuning and fixing these things for your specific project, you will "mostly" get things like cross-platform support for all major desktop operating systems, some support for accessibility-tools like screen readers and voice over, devtools and debuggers, application installers, (push) notifications, caching, some aspects of security and cryptography, log handling, and file handling for free, or at least get a reasonable push in the right direction, with Electron.

The alternative is either getting each of these things from a different third party source, or making them all in-house. With a popular abstraction layer like Electron + a web stack, you will to some extent encounter the same problems, mysterious log messages, design considerations and other issues as everyone else. This means that you can find documentation, stack overflow questions, new hires, consultants, blogs, LLMs, etc. that have the skills and knowledge you need, instead of researching and solving everything in-house.

For low budget teams with a decent amount of web experience, you'll still ship faster with electron.

Also, testing is easier with electron if your desktop app started life as a web app.

It will still be usable in the browser. I don’t think it’s in the article, but there are posts about it from the CTO on Twitter

FWIW, rust can be compiled to WASM, so it's technically possible to also have a web app perhaps with a pinch of JavaScript.

Only true today for Linux. For both Windows and Mac we ship an ARM64 client. With this new Rust version we're also going to ship an ARM64 Linux client.

Except it’s confirmed to not be Tauri.

Nah, ease of running it in the browser is a saving grace for us on Linux. MS does not offer an official Linux client.

Also Slack

Microsoft has already had execs saying the next big thing is AI rewriting stuff to Rust. You think you are joking, but I'm sure it is on someone's roadmap in the Teams org.

Of course, being the Teams org they'd likely still find a way to end up with a bloated mess even after a Rust rewrite.