Claude Code can write native Swift good enough to ship a Mac App Store app. Anthropic’s own Claude desktop app is still built using Electron - a web browser (Chromium) wearing a costume.

Electron bundles a full Chromium browser and a Node.js runtime inside every app, so one codebase renders on Windows, macOS and Linux instead of three native builds. It’s why Slack, Discord and (until recently) Notion feel identical everywhere. It’s also why they’re memory-hungry, slow to open and never quite right: patchy keyboard shortcuts, no proper native menu behaviour, battery life your MacBook resents.

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I read Austin Henley’s post Automating my job away on a Friday night and did the laziest possible thing with it.

Henley’s whole piece builds to one prompt. A friend who runs a startup tells his team don’t do anything three times - if a task comes round more than twice, automate it. Henley took that to its logical end and pointed his coding agent at its own history.

So I copied his idea, swapped “Copilot” for “Cowork”, and pasted this in:

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I built Felix myself. With a lot of help.

The vibe coding workflow goes like this: you have an itch, you describe it to Claude, you argue back and forth about implementation details you half-understand and Claude half-understands, and eventually something exists that didn’t before. Felix exists this way. A small personal app I’ve been nudging and extending for a few months, named for Felix the Catalog (a nod to the ancient Aussie penned cartoon series).

The original brief was modest. A way to manage all the bookmarks I was accumulating by starring items in RSS lists I read. The problem with list apps is they’re either too simple to be useful or too powerful to be fast. Felix landed exactly where I needed it.

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Geir Isene sat down at his computer last week and realised something unusual. Almost every program he touched - the window manager, the text editor, the file manager, the terminal, the email client, the calendar - was software he wrote himself. In a few weeks, with Claude Code as his engineering partner, he had replaced his entire desktop computing environment. All of it command line. All of it terminal-native. All of it his.

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