Claude Opus drove a Mac to Windows port, says Daniel Nguyen

Daniel Nguyen says he ported Bolt AI and PDF Pals to Windows using Expo and Claude Opus running in VMPal's agent mode, and that the agent did most of the implementation itself. It started as a proof of concept, he says, and the end result surpassed his expectations.

Daniel Nguyen

@daniel_nguyenx

X

I spent most of the time on QA-ing. This is honestly incredible.

The detail that makes it concrete is how little of the work was his. Running on his Mac without what he calls the annoying permission approval step, Opus analysed and screenshotted the Mac app, generated a full plan for the port, then downloaded the Rust toolchain to compile native UI components for Windows. Nguyen says it built a native Markdown renderer with syntax highlighting via tree-sitter and math expressions via RaTex. It also found a couple of bugs in the react-native-windows package and generated a small C# and WinUI app to verify them.

He set up an SSH server on a Dell laptop so Claude could smoke test the release build and run benchmarks against a low-end PC. His own time, he says, went almost entirely to QA.

Why Expo and not WinUI

Asked why he would use Expo and React Native when the Mac app is already native in AppKit and SwiftUI, Nguyen gave two answers. The short one is that his mobile apps are already in Expo, so porting beat rebuilding from scratch in WPF or WinUI. The long one is maintenance.

Two code bases cover iOS, Android, web, Mac and now Windows, he says, and his products are Mac-first. Because they are UI and UX heavy, native UI components matter, and he says Expo and React Native handle that well. The Windows build uses Mica and the Fluent Design System and he describes it as fast.

On the usual objection, he concedes there is minor JS overhead but says he tested on multiple low-end devices and performance held. His rule of thumb is to keep the JS lean and move performance critical code, things like encryption and large binary data, to native. He says he would like official Linux support next.

The business read

This is one founder's account of one port, not a benchmark, and he is explicit that it was not the one-shot job someone joked it could be. @TablePlus half-joked he could just one-shot it with VMPal and Claude, and Nguyen says it took more effort than that. Still, the shape of the claim is the interesting part. A second desktop platform used to be a hiring decision or a quarter of roadmap for a solo developer. Nguyen's version of the cost is review time and QA, with the compiling, planning and bug hunting pushed onto the agent.

Daniel Nguyen

@daniel_nguyenx

X

The longer answer is I don’t want to maintain 3 different code base / tech stacks.