alt Hacker NewsNone of this matters anymore.
We have LLMs.
It's easy to build native everything now without much resource expenditure.
Android will be Kotlin. iOS will be Swift. Desktop and server will be Rust. Web will be TypeScript / React for now, but maybe one day WASM.
LLMs are the target now.
Replies
FYI I've been building an app, Android first, and discovered the magic of Kotlin Multiplatform. The LLM modularized everything so that it's substantively the same code base, but with Swift only where it's needed. Still working through it, but it seems like a great and underrated platform to build on.
I'm building an app that targets Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux. There's no way I'm going to be maintaining 5 different codebases, even with LLMs.
This is one of those “oh gosh” posts at first glance, then you actually think about it, and it’s 100% correct. Python, Node exist to save the precious commodity of developer time. Once that’s no longer precious, best value comes from purified custom Rust, no attack surface from huge libraries, optimized performance for the specific task on all possible hardware.
Windows desktop native is WinUI 3 and Windows App SDK, for better or for worse. No amount of Rust and tokens will recreate everything you get out of the box with that stack. Native needs to feel native.
not sure why you're getting downvoted. but if you're building even very popular applications, it is quite easy to see how LLMs are very well suited for this type of consistency job.
- they follow instructions quite well.
- are tireless at doing mechanical ports between languages and frameworks.
- Can understand a new ecosystem quite well.
Yet, neither ChatGPT desktop app nor Claude Code CLI is native. Mind you these are made by companies with practically infinite tokens.