Electron backlash meets cheap native rewrites

A piece arguing every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, using Discord as the example, drew the usual response that this has been known since VS Code launched. The new angle is in the replies, where one commenter hopes for "a new wave of desktop apps rewritten natively, thanks to LLMs," naming Rust with GPUI or C++ with Dear ImGui. Another notes that Microsoft Teams and new Outlook look light on memory because their windows run under the Edge process name.

The Electron argument was always that one web codebase beats three native ones. LLMs lower the cost of writing native code, which weakens that argument. The same shift shows in the JIT bitmap text rendering and Mizu shared-memory posts, where people care about the low-level details again.

The doubt: Electron's real advantage is shared team skills and fast iteration. Cheaper code generation doesn't erase maintenance cost across platforms.