Thread

1. simonw · 1790197468 · focus · HN ↗

   I visited <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;claude.ai&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;claude.ai&#x2F; over a mobile tethered connection from my laptop the other day and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it loaded.

   (That said, I just had a look in Firefox and it loads 20.78 MB of JavaScript (6.84 MB compressed) so I expect they could make it a bunch lighter if they kept trying.)

   1. mwcampbell · 1790228646 · focus · HN ↗

      I doubt that they could iterate from where they are to an optimal solution though. What would have gotten them there more reliably is a development culture that would have found it disgusting to even consider shipping that much JS in the first place. And I don&#x27;t buy the &quot;then they never would have shipped at all&quot; argument in this case, because, unlike the case of shipping cross-platform desktop apps before Electron, we did ship plenty of web apps, including interactive chat-shaped apps, before it became easy to unthinkingly ship a JS bundle that big.
   2. brazukadev · 1790236001 · focus · HN ↗

      &gt; so I expect they could make it a bunch lighter if they kept trying.

      What is preventing a 1T dollars company from &quot;keep trying&quot;? What did they &quot;kept trying&quot; that got them to ship a webapp with 21mb of JavaScript?

      This is a failure of their software engineering culture. Keep trying the same thing will keep doubling their JS, not halving it. That&#x27;s the effect of incompetence + LLM reliance.

      I wouldn&#x27;t expect any better from a company that uses nextjs and React for their cli&#x2F;TUI.

      1. simonw · 1790263186 · focus · HN ↗

         Yeah, culture. I expect most of the web developers at Anthropic are of the generation that considers 21MB of JavaScript a perfectly reasonable way to build a web app.

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