I’ve had good, alternative experience with my sideproject (adashape.com) where most of the codebase is now written by Claude / Codex.
The codebase itself is architected and documented to be LLM friendly and claude.md gives very strong harnesses how to do things.
As architect Claude is abysmal, but when you give it an existing software pattern it merely needs to extend, it’s so good it still gives me probably something like 5x feature velocity boost.
Plus when doing large refactorings, it forgets much fever things than me.
Inventing new architecture is as hard as ever and it’s not great help there - unless you can point it to some well documented pattern and tell it ”do it like that please”.
"WPF had made a bet on then-advanced graphics hardware for reasonable performance, and that was bad for these users. "
OTOH WPF is today surprisingly strong GUI platform if you just want to get your Windows GUI out there.
It runs really nicely even on low end hardware. All the nice styling and blending techniques now _just work_ even on the most cheap low end laptop.
The fact it's over decade old means all the LLM:s actually know really well how to use it.
So you can just guide your LLM to follow Microsoft best practices on logic development and styling and "just add this button here, this button here, add this styling here" etc.
It's the least annoying GUI development experience I've ever had (as a dev, non-designer).
Of course not portable out of the box (avalonia is then the ticket there).
If you want 3D, you can just plug in OpenTK with OpenGL 3.3. Decades old _but good enough for almost everything_ if you are not writing a high perf game.
Really, WPF plus OpenTK is a really robust and non-surprising development platform that runs from old laptops (eg. T14 Gen 2 per my testing) onwards.
I've been doing a sideproject using WPF and OpenTK - .net works really great - here is a sample video of the whole stack (from adashape.com)
I'm paying $20 for Codex and $90 for the Claude Max plan. They are a "pry from my cold dead fingers" product for me.
IMO if someone tried this tech last time 6 months ago, or their only exposure is eg. via MS copilot, they do have a rational reason for skepticism. No technology of this complexity has improved this rapidly in my memory (well, ok, we had the CPU speed races from 90's to early 2000's).
The CPU speed race might be the most apt comparison I've yet heard.
From the 80486 to AMD Athlon64 X2 and much of that progress was enabled by better EDA being run on the more powerful CPUs being made with each improvement.
Now, we have better models helping to create even better models.
How about if they plateau but prices skyrocket? Most companies would pay but if you're not working for a company that does pay for it, what's the line beyhond which you'd think twice about paying for it yourself? 500? 1000? 1500?
Let's say they have already plateau. But hardware continues to get better, right? So tokens should go down in price, not up. Since they're already 50%+ on inference today, better hardware would allow them to generate more tokens for less money.
I would pay $500 to start, build stuff with it, then keep going up the tiers as the stuff I'm building makes money.
I mean technically they did with Windows on NT and again with Windows on Windows 64. Vista was also a huge redesign from the 1990s NT to a lot of the new technologies they'd made in Longhorn.
If Unity were to ship platform native replacement for WPF equivalent (hell or even winforms) it would become a really enticing app development platform.
Aren't these pretty much the most trivial UI apps possible? E.g. compared to other native apps like Photoshop, Blender, Visual Studio or Office, CRUD is mostly just about banging together custom UI frontend for a database.
Unity's editor is implemented in its own (old) UI system, same with Godot, so in both engines it's possible to create 'traditional' non-game UI applications.
A Unity expert can correct me, but IIRC (possibly wrongly) at least the following limitations apply:
For example Unity does not have accessibility features (screen readers etc) nor I don’t think it’s DPI aware. I would _guess_ it does not support platform fonts. Not sure if it supports non-latin font layouts like arabic. Etc etc.
The codebase itself is architected and documented to be LLM friendly and claude.md gives very strong harnesses how to do things.
As architect Claude is abysmal, but when you give it an existing software pattern it merely needs to extend, it’s so good it still gives me probably something like 5x feature velocity boost.
Plus when doing large refactorings, it forgets much fever things than me.
Inventing new architecture is as hard as ever and it’s not great help there - unless you can point it to some well documented pattern and tell it ”do it like that please”.
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