There are a lot of advantages of native software over web-based software, when done well. I don't think that statement is controversial. We usually talk about the obvious: respect for platform idioms and design, alongside performance. But less about integrated accessibility or the unique features each platform provides. But for years there's been a trade-off. Writing native meant multiple codebases, more engineers, and feature parity was a constant fight. This usually meant only well-funded teams would have the capacity, or that you'd see native mobile apps but a shared web app on desktop. A couple years ago, I started asking a question: can agents handle native code and libraries? They've always excelled in the web space, which makes sense given the corpus of open-source and well-documented JavaScript to train on. But native has always been trickier. There's less code out there to train on, libraries are more opaque, and the tooling can be convoluted. When I tried working with Cursor to create a native Windows app in 2024, the results were weak to the point where it took quite a lot of debugging to get what it had written to even build and run. Skip forward just a year, and I'm back pondering the same thought. But things have moved on. CLI agents are here, the models are stronger. So I pull out Claude Code and throw Opus 4 a task: create a WinUI 3 app for the server platform Proxmox. This time, I got back a working result. ![Proxmox Manager, a native WinUI frontend to the Proxmox virtualization server.](/images/make-it-native/proxmox-winui.png) I wouldn't call the app "well crafted". Far from it: Claude still didn't fully understand the native user interface toolkit and was trying to apply a weird mix of Windows and web styling. But the fact it ran and worked was incredible. This put me into overdrive. Suddenly all the things I've wanted to build for years have been unlocked. ## Please Do ~~Not~~ Touch We have a Plex media server at home, but the official Plex app for Windows is just a wrapper around their web app. Serviceable with a keyboard and mouse. Frustrating to use with touch. The buttons are too small, menus don't respond right, it just doesn't feel great. I channelled that frustration into creating **Hearth**, which uses Windows App SDK and WinUI. Now I'm getting all of those touch behaviours for free with the platform. To the point where it led me down a rabbit hole -- could I explore more tailored interactions that extend what's built in? iOS has a fun interaction model where long-pressing on an item shows a preview of its contents, a legacy of the 3D Touch pattern debuted over a decade ago. Could a design like this be adapted to Windows to, say, show me more details of a music album on long press?

Writing

2026

Make It Native