YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Exact – a new cross platform UI framework by the Expo team

37 points vmg12 2 hours ago 19 comments

yewenjie 1 hour ago | parent

Why isn't Android support there?

solarkraft 1 hour ago | parent

Presumably they’re focusing on a few platforms first. As they noted it’s coming though

tyleregeto 10 minutes ago | parent

They mention Android on the linked page. It's a work in progress, but further behind.

solarkraft 1 hour ago | parent

Ambitious. I’m sure they know what their problems are and how to solve them, as evidenced by the agent being able to control the UI’s timing (and it being mentioned so far up). Getting the agent to get interactivity right is pretty hard otherwise.

doodlesdev 1 hour ago | parent

This is absolutely huge. If the Expo team can demonstrate that this development strategy is viable, we will finally see a resurgence of native applications and more efficient software, getting rid of the Electron bloat.

It's a long shot for now, though! There are lot of gritty nitty details they have to get right. One of the first issues I can imagine is this framework being great to use with Opus 5.5 but not good enough with i.e. Gemini 4 Argon or DeepSeek v4.1 Flash 1017, due to the overreliance on having AI models write the code.

tevon 1 hour ago | parent

If anyone is going to get it right - I'd bet on the expo team. They know these sharp edges and have been building for them for years.

prmph 1 hour ago | parent

Is this satire?

jkahrs595 1 hour ago | parent

Is this a serious question? Why would it be satire? Is it building something you don’t like or want? Say what you actually mean.

prmph 1 hour ago | parent

It is weird. What does "agent native" mean? This looks like work that requires the use of agents to use properly.

Hence me thinking it is satire. Are we already at a point where libraries and frameworks are being written such that they require agents (from maybe paid frontier models) to properly use?

We live in strange times, if so.

Interestingly, I was just thinking of this problem today: how can I stick with react-like declarative UIs (like one I have developed myself) but yet have them abstracted over native UI frameworks of Apple, Android, even TUIs to produce native apps? What I would have expected is a fully deterministic runtime, compiler, or library approach to solving this, not an agent-driven "solution".

wahnfrieden 24 minutes ago | parent

No, there's no requirement to use agents, and others are already building tools for manually working with Construct with a purpose-built editor.

Tools like Hyperframes have already demonstrated the value in catering to agentic-first dev while offering manual inspection and editing interfaces.

Agents aren't equally good at all languages/tools, and just having a lot of training data on one ecosystem isn't enough to optimize the experience. If you read the announcement thread from the CEO there are several points made such as formal safeties against invalid states and build error messages that token-efficiently teach the agent correct usage.

> What does "agent native" mean?

https://github.com/expo/exact#1-agent-native defines it

hysan 1 hour ago | parent

Since there are no releases, I assuming this is still a WIP? It would explain why they list Linux and then don’t have any screenshots of it next to the other platforms. How it works is kinda light on details. I’m interested to learn more about the under the hood aspects of how they are translating everything to the different native toolkits.

vmg12 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, it's an early alpha they announced on twitter today.

wahnfrieden 31 minutes ago | parent

Expo CEO estimated 2-3 months until production-ready

mrbombastic 59 minutes ago | parent

this tendency to prioritize agents over humans for new software DX makes me sympathize with the Butlerian jihad.

wahnfrieden 22 minutes ago | parent

In what way does this worsen human DX?

The announcement thread covers ways it helps agents, and they sound like things that would help humans, too.

sirjaz 53 minutes ago | parent

Why isn't Windows supported. Thr largest desktop platform out there?

zdragnar 50 minutes ago | parent

Because it is an early alpha release maybe?

tdhz77 16 minutes ago | parent

The world has moved away from JavaScript. With llm, native is easy and the best option even for a single developer.