Boris Cherny on Trying to Get Claude Code to Rewrite the Claude App

Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, described an experiment where he tasked Claude with rewriting the Claude desktop app from Electron to native Swift, instructing it to compare the two versions pixel-by-pixel until completion—a process that has been running for over two weeks. However, the author argues this is not a serious effort to create a native Mac client, as the fundamental problem with the current app is poor design rather than merely the choice of framework.