GoKawiilHello, Rafael here - every week I cover interesting challenges and developments that I’ve come across recently through the lens of an engineer building AI systems.
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There has been a flurry of AI-powered apps and AI features in the last couple of years. Incumbent players like Slack have swiftly added AI features to its roster. For AI-native ones like Cursor, Notion, ChatGPT Desktop and Claude Desktop, AI was always part of the raison d’être.
The more AI features these apps released, the more I became inclined to look at their inner workings. Hopefully I would be able to uncover a bit of what’s running under the hood; at the very least, I would learn one thing or two about desktop app development.
Coincidentally, I noticed I started exhausting my Copilot credits earlier and earlier each month. This ended up pulling me towards selecting a main candidate for my experiments. I decided to dive deep into VS Code and Copilot.
One common denominator: Electron
Common amongst all of the apps above is the fact that they are built using Electron. Electron is a JavaScript framework which helps developers build and distribute desktop applications. In layman’s terms, it works by bundling a Node.js runtime along with HTML, CSS and JavaScript artifacts, which are then rendered via Chromium.
List of apps using Electron. I know, it’s a lot. Source
This removes the need of having multiple codebases in native languages for different platforms (for instance, C# for Windows and Swift for macOS), making it easier for developers to build desktop applications that run across multiple platforms from a single codebase. (Native modules and certain packaging steps still often require per-platform handling, but the bulk of the application logic is shared.)
Because they share Electron, they share a rough architecture, which means whatever I learned probing one should transfer to the others.
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