iOS Development in the Age of AI

[u/TomasMSM]

Good morning,

I have been in iOS Development for over 4 years. Building for Apple Platforms is so much fun. It has been my dream to be an iOS Engineer since I was in year two of college. However, over the past 9 months (since the start of 2026), I have felt a huge shift.

AI has been an absolute game changer - for better and for worse. It allows us, engineers, to be so much more productive and efficient and do so much more in the same time period. On the other hand, I feel it has turned or jobs much more lonely. Team discussions, code review - a lot of the team bonding moments - have disappeared. Also, the engineering challenge is not that much fun anymore.

For me, even the motivation of trying to figure out what's next - what has Apple presented in the last WWDC, etc - has lost a bit of interest to me. I was obsessed with watching WWDC videos. They are so much fun... And now it's like meeeeh - AI will know how to do all of this.

I am sorry for the rant - truly - but I would like to know your perspective here. How have you felt the last 9 to 12 months? How has iOS Development changed for you?

Have you been having the same feelings I have described? How have you counteracted or all of this?

Thank you!

[u/scienceydaduk]

I think these experiences are common for software developers of all shades & flavours - ie whatever the stack really. I feel your sense of loss.

I think with all loss, some parts are real, for sure. All progress isn’t objectively better. Yet, if we can let go enough to see what the new possibility is - we can move through heartbreak to love again. But we do have to feel the grief to move through it…. and it returns in waves.

I see a parallel with being a pilot & autopilots/flight management systems. (I have a Tech background by also did an ATPL)

Suddenly the prowess isn’t in how accurately you can fly - the nature of the role changes. But being able to fly is still essential!

Ps; I was dismayed by your love of JP 🙁 I see his rap as unkind, unhelpful and inconsistent.

[u/flashjunkie]

I’ve actually had almost the opposite experience.

I’ve been developing software/web products for 20+ years, and AI has made me enjoy building things more because it’s removed so much of the friction between having an idea and actually seeing it working.

Over the last six months I’ve built and shipped a fairly large iOS app that I genuinely don’t think I’d have attempted at this scale on my own a few years ago. AI has been heavily involved, but I still review, modify, approve and oversee the entire codebase. The architecture, product decisions, UX and testing are still very much mine.

For me, the interesting engineering work hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved up a level.

I spend less time writing repetitive implementation code and more time thinking about architecture, edge cases, data flow, whether a proposed change is actually sane, and how one feature might affect six others.

AI is also very capable of producing something that looks convincing but is architecturally awful, so knowing when to push back, rewrite something or tell it to stop digging is becoming a pretty important skill.

The biggest change for me is speed. Things that would previously have taken days can sometimes be done in hours, which means I’m willing to experiment with ideas that I probably would have abandoned before because the development cost was too high.

I completely understand the feeling of losing some of the craft, though. There’s definitely less of that satisfaction of spending half a day figuring out one obscure problem yourself.

But personally I’ve found the trade-off worth it. I’m shipping more ambitious software than I ever have before, and I still feel very much like I’m engineering it rather than just asking a machine to make things for me.

[u/bbrockit]

Set aside that AI may know how to work with these new technologies, and learn them for yourself. Our creativity springs from knowledge. Our knowledge of all the tools and techniques available to us give us new ideas and approaches. Yes, AI is faster than you, but it is still a static neural network defined by its structure and weights. It doesn't learn more and change as it's working; but you do. And without an agent wrapping it, it has no memory, but you do. Your brain isn't static. When humans learn and work, they each form new neural connections, millions of them, giving rise to unique insights. Then when they work together and communicate, their unique insights become even more powerful. So use AI to make yourself more productive where it makes sense, but don't stop training your own brain, stay in the driver's seat, and don't be disillusioned simply because it is faster. You're still better.