[grandinquistor]

I’ve been using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) for React/React Native side projects. I have experience with these frameworks so I could guide the AI with individual tasks and catch mistakes, and overall it worked pretty well.

Recently I tried building a native iOS app with zero Swift experience, giving the AI just a markdown spec. This was basically vibe coding, I didn’t understand much beyond general software principles. It quickly broke down: hallucinated method signatures, got stuck on implementing extensions, and couldn’t recover. I would run the app on my device and give it feedback and logs. After hours wasted, I spent some time reading the docs and fixed the issues myself in 30 minutes.

My takeaway: AI will accelerate developers but won’t replace them. Still, acceleration means fewer engineers will be needed to ship the same amount of work.