Claude, Codex, Opencode, everything is Electron. With agents and solid engineering fundamentals, I set out to prove that we don't need to take that shortcut any more and we can, in fact, ship high quality/performance applications.
It's still early days - but I got something basic working. I've embedded the Goose harness as a back end and am using the UI framework used by the Zed editor.
https://github.com/alshlabs/quill
I'm keeping the source closed for a little while. Also if anyone from the major labs is hiring, hihi, I make quality things.
Also I'm aware that this is a rip off of vscode's design. I like their UI, lends itself well to projects and so on. In a different life I might have ported vscode to Rust - but no one uses IDEs any more haha
The purpose of software is to help people with their problems. I think it's easy to tell ourselves that other people want to use our tools which we really made to help ourselves (especially if them using it also helps ourselves even more!). And also, this is all so new and there are real opportunities that it is good to learn and try new things and be open to actually making something valuable.
But! Other people extensively using agents are literally the last people who would pay for a project like this! And unless it's a fulltime job like it is for a 5 or so well resourced tech companies, it's hard to make something as good and useful as them. I say this as someone who spent a long time on this problem as my fulltime job.
We should still have fun with our work. But literally, "software for other software people, that solves the problem of us needing to write more software for writing software, faster", who is that helping? There are no constraints or end users besides ourselves, and half of that is not so much it benefiting us through productivity, but learning new things and play - again, important. But there's a reason so many people are doing this and I think it's because they don't have to go outside and solve someone else's problem, or do something unusual, or involving unfun non-software aspects - agents are fun! But how many random people's agent have you installed?
IMO: if the technology does not help a non-technology person live a better life, and especially if it involves "using an agent to build a framework for agents" we should do some more, deeper introspection about what problem we are actually solving and whether or not we're being ambitious. And I say that not to pick on you but myself.
For the end user, the outcome will likely be the same when compared to opencode or similar, but the journey will be nicer
I expect no one to actually use it though, however nice it might be to hope for that
We should build everything using a AAA FPS engine loop now that we can. The amount of shit that happens in one rendered frame of overwatch is wild. And then we go and do like 200 of those per second.
You actually would have been better off replacing your SVG animation with a game loop! Assuming you're using Lottie you can easily swap it to render into a `<canvas>` which doesn't have any of that overhead and uses `requestAnimationFrame` which automatically gets throttled in inactive tabs.
You can try rendering a 2D rectangle as 2 quads in whatever GPU API you like the most, then try pushing the same amount of pixels to a CPU buffer via the widest CPU memory write instructions you can have (and then wait the GPU-accelerated compositor upload them to the GPU anyways to present them...).
I can tell you for a fact one will be 2 orders of magnitude faster, want to make bet which one?
Using a GPU api does not imply you have to render at the screen's refresh rate, or even that you have to update the entire window.
There's a reason why browsers are so complicated and equally non performant. 2D rendering, even GPU accelerated, with the constraints we have right now (or rather, the lack of constraints, because 3D rendering is basically tradeoffs all the time), is not going to be more performant.
This never stopped the Electron devs until now, I honestly can't see why they'd start to get any better now that the slop machine lets them be even lazier.