Claude Code Can Now Build and Test iOS Apps in Apple's Simulator

Brace yourselves for an avalanche of vibe-coded slop.

Harsh, and possibly true, but then there's folks like me with good ideas but no computer science degree who have been empowered with AI. I learned some python from evening classes (my day job is in life sciences) and could only write simple data transformation scripts that would take me weeks to debug.

With AI - I'm writing creating genuinely useful programs I could never have dreamed of.

Let's not be totally down on AI!

I guess Im a developer now.

Brace yourselves for an avalanche of vibe-coded slop.

Harsh, and possibly true, but then there's folks like me with good ideas but no computer science degree who have been empowered with AI. I learned some python from evening classes (my day job is in life sciences) and could only write simple data transformation scripts that would take me weeks to debug.

With AI - I'm writing creating genuinely useful programs I could never have dreamed of.

Let's not be totally down on AI!

I fully agree with you.

I guess Im a developer now.

You laugh but I published an app to the app store last month and I’m definitely not a developer.

Harsh, and possibly true, but then there's folks like me with good ideas but no computer science degree who have been empowered with AI. I learned some python from evening classes (my day job is in life sciences) and could only write simple data transformation scripts that would take me weeks to debug.

With AI - I'm writing creating genuinely useful programs I could never have dreamed of.

Let's not be totally down on AI!

I have an idea of an app I'd like to make, but when I have the time and headspace for it, I'm not going to vibe-code it. I want to understand the code I'm putting out. I've learned coding before, I can learn it again.

Like some have already commented, I have mixed feelings about this.

In one hand, discovering genuinely good apps will be harder, because you won’t be able to know whether an app is code-vibed, containing many bugs that the “code prompter” doesn’t know how to properly solve, or has been written by a coder even if it’s with the help of AI. No way to know unless you already know the dev.

But on the other hand… like user @CalMin said, this tools, that are getting better and better at coding, allow us, mere mortals that never were able to learn code, to easily make small programs or scripts.

Let me share an example. There’s been a software niche that wasn’t covered until a few months: an Obsidian-like knowledge management software, with local LLM integrated RAG system. Most of the local RAG systems I know are based on complex configuration that involve several software components.

So there’s a guy (or gal, idk) that six months ago started building this app for macOS, Canto ('https://lonelyduck.io/canto'), using AI to develop it much faster, quickly implementing new features in few days. I haven’t tried it yet, so I still don’t know how polished it is, but if it wasn’t for AI-assisted development, apps such as this one wouldn’t exist.

I accept that AI is a powerful tool, and in the right hands can be fantastic. Like you said though, how can we tell which apps are good or not? How can we see the difference between a vibe-coded slop-fest that is a pretty collection of vulnerabilities, an app that has been vibe-coded with some forethought that only has a few vulnerabilities, and will get hard to maintain over future versions, or a very thoughtfully made app that has had AI used in its creation, but is quality all the way through?