schrodinger

This sounds really interesting — have any links you wouldn't mind sharing?

I came to this conclusion too and felt rather defeated, existential crisis, etc. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if we had a country of 250 million unemployed angry folks (many of them armed), I'm not so sure it'd be the wealthy in control.

Wrong thread, Rolexes are discussed above.

Wow.

Honestly, I initially regretted posting my comment because besides a native iPhone app, I've never built GUI software. I did no research of my one and asked a very open-ended question and felt intellectually dishonest and lazy, and almost deleted it.

I'm so glad I didn't.

This comment is one of the most information-dense helpful resources I've read in a long time (and such a welcome reprieve from the "slop"), that anything I did to contribute to its existence was worth it.

Thank you so much for writing this, and I strongly recommend you post this somewhere very public — on your _beautiful_ personal site at the very least, and I'll do my best to spread it around. I've only built an exquisitely designed iPhone app, as the sole eng alongside a great designer, and barely considered anything but native because our brand was very high-end in the startup-of-a-lifetime great way, and we wouldn't settle for anything else.

Correction: the domain mentioned at end was simonwillison.net.

Depends on the split. You’re probably right — even after worrying about cross-language ABI stuff, compiled libraries would have many advantages.

But especially with Agentic AI, I could imagine some scenarios where being able to run the guts of your editor out of process, e.g. on a cloud box or even a local docker container, being pretty advantageous.

This is how Claude Code GUI works but to be fair that’s less of an editor.

How would you do it? Honestly curious?

If I were to build an editor, I’d want the GUI platform-native so would probably go straight for Xcode and Swift.

If I had a strong aversion to Swift, I might consider a hybrid design where the UI is Swift and write a backend in a modern, fast language I prefer (Go/Rust/C# come to mind, but this isn’t a call-to-arms in the language wars). I believe this could be achieved since LSP works well as a backend server supplying IDE-level niceties, so I could keep most functionality implementations there. I’d have to have a strong reason though since Swift is a fine language, and AI does much of the writing now.

Then again, most devs live on a Mac and deploy to Linux, and are increasingly using Agents which may be better off cloud-hosted or at least sandboxed, so lightweight Swift UI and most logic in a headless cli app could be an interesting design choice.

But the important part to me would be low-bloat and native UI, and I’ve never found cross-platform UI frameworks to hold up in practice — even if only because different OSes necessarily have different ideas of idiomatic design, so you’d either be using least common denominator UI components that feel uncanny, or reimplementing the UI for each platform.

Have you found a language / framework combo that’s fast, fits into the OS well, and is _fun_ to write and use? Or is your idea that separate implementations are now so low cost — who cares — let the AI maintain them?

Legitimately asking in good faith, so please don’t interpret anything as snippy in there — it’s just my understanding of the state of the world. I’d genuinely love to learn about how cross-platform options have expanded if I’m missing something!

I forward my catch-all to gmail so I get they're great spam filtering while preserving the ability to switch off of them instantly should I decide to in the future.

This is a great idea, but I think it's worth reconsidering the "first person to answer, handles it" logic. All the folks who didn't answer in time are now panicked with no idea what's going on.

Instead, you could make it so anyone who answers after the first person starts out muted and hears a message like: "Uncle Bob's on the line, press 1 to join the call or stay on the line to listen quietly." They could then choose whether or not to join in.

Just a thought! Great idea nonetheless — I'd buy it if I had a valid use case!

Great idea nonetheless though!

I love this message. Your advice was:

* Actionable

* Constructive

* Succinct

* Borne out of relevant experience

And you were sure to thank them for the contribution. This is a model HN comment.

If Apple "pushes an iCloud address onto you" that you don't want, why not just freaking ignore it completely? Don't share it with friends, they won't know about it. Don't ever log into it. Ignore it.

Who cares?

FWIW I use my free iCloud email account with my custom domain since Apple (unlike Google) offers that as a free service. However, I just forward all email to my GMail address and use a custom reply-to in GMail so it _seems_ like I'm using the custom domain in both directions.

*rogue, rouge = red in French!