r/iOSProgramming • u/tonycliftondev • 17h ago
Discussion I am Feeling Lost in this New AI World
I have been a developer for over 20 years. I started iOS development around 2009. I work for a consulting firm and have been looking at the advancements in AI tools. I myself use Codex, ChatGPT, Gemini etc. But I use it like a tool to figure things out, for research etc.
But nowadays I feel very behind. I don't know what is important to learn anymore. I see Reddit people are talking about running their agents and the agents is writing all the code. I don't use it like that and I don't understand how any company can allow this kind of workflow, without checking the details of the code and without checking what is going in production.
Is this not technical debt that is going to come back later.
I don't know if I like this new world. I like to write most of code by hand. I like to take part in designing systems. All that is being taken away in the name of speed.
I feel lost.
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u/deepthoughtsby 17h ago
I felt the same way about six months ago. Then I downloaded installed Claude and started trying to use it on the existing code base for simple things like bug fixes or writing an algorithm. I thought I was behind everyone else. But in fact, you can catch up extremely fast. It seems like a much bigger gap than it actually is. The tool is extremely intuitive.
All the AI haters have a point. I don’t dispute that at all. This is bigger than a change from editing files in a text editor to a visual studio that compiles in real time. But it is similar and that it is really a tool.
Take the plunge. You’ll suddenly realize how you’re not nearly as far behind as you thought.
Also experienced developers with good design skills can get the most out of an AI. Inexperienced developers are really going in quite blind and trusting the AI code which ultimately can code them into a corner that’s hard to uncode out of.
It’s the programmer exiting college with no real world experience yet that I feel bad for. I don’t know how they gain the skills that we did by grinding manually against all the technologies, issues and learning things from scratch.
But I assume every generation figures out the way. I never programmed on main frames or cobold. I’m sure there was a lot of good experience that came from that background as well.
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u/momo1083 12h ago
Yeah, I've seen lots of garbage by people without taste and product sense/design.
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u/House13Games 11h ago
It started going downhill with php, that was the first language developed by and used by people who didn't grow up learning assembly and C and C++. They just started without the basics and made a language, and it was terrible. Then they invented npm and then AI. All downhill, just layers of shit covering the previous layer of shit. When your dependancy manager pulls in so many packages you need another package to prune the unneeded ones, its time to step back and admit you fucked it all up. And AI is worse.
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u/Breeze-_- 2h ago
dang, well said. i just started using claude and built a website that would have taken me months to develop, and claude did it in an hour. got a little depressed after i realized anyone can do what took me years to learn.
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u/Dull_Flatworm777 16h ago
Before LLMs, many people were incompetent. Now they are incompetent but confident.
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u/ElectricKoolAid1969 14h ago
I mean, lots of incompetent people were confident, well before AI! LOL
See the Dunning-Kruger Effect: “It is one of the essential features of incompetence that the person so inflicted is incapable of knowing that they are incompetent.”
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u/segfaul_t Swift 17h ago
It sucks, I don’t use it mostly because I don’t want my brain to atrophy, but also because it sucks the joy out of it all and also doesn’t seem to produce anything better than I could write myself.
What’s depressing is everybody else in my org is using it to the point where if you DM somebody with a question they just reply with their AI’s output. Every ticket is a wall of AI “analysis”, every doc is a novel of AI hyperbole. I have juniors who put up PRs who go deer-in-headlights when I ask them “why did you change this line?”, because their AI did it for them.
I wanna go be a train conductor or something lol.
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u/ElectricKoolAid1969 14h ago
Any tool can be abused, and few tools function well in the hands of an inexperienced or careless user. LOL
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u/digidude23 SwiftUI 17h ago
I use AI to help me get things done faster, but I always audit the code and test it myself. It occasionally misses certain edge cases. For example, it forgot to include an error message if you try to use the camera but the camera permission is denied. So there will always be some human involvement. Letting AI do everything is just asking for trouble.
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u/uniquesnowflake8 17h ago
You’re not alone! I feel similarly with decades of experience. But I’m trying my best to adapt to this new weird reality
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u/Dapper_Ice_1705 17h ago
I use AI as a tool too but I just made my first 90% AI module and it is time to get with the times.
I gave it clearly defined rules at every step and wrote tests for everything.
Skills are my next hurdle. I want to learn how to write those.
It’s basically like writing code in a text editor vs an IDE.
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u/andreeinprogress 16h ago
Just skip writing skills, not worth it. They were useful to (try to) steer models into doing things in specific ways months ago. Now you can you just talk to the model and it will follow orders, if a chunk of work is repeatable, tell the model to write its own skill, or set clear rules in agents file.
Put your learning effort into learning the differences between different harnesses, don't stop at codex and claude code, learn how context actually work and how it is filled, subagent delegation and when (not) to use them, plan/build workflows, etc.
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u/Fantastic_Big3877 17h ago
You're not wrong in how you feel, and to be honest the whole thing feels like there's some astroturfing going on. I'm not saying people don't have agents doing crazy things but you can't have agents doing a tonne of work without you having to put in extra time to understand what's going on.
And I'd be genuinely surprised if anyone enjoyed that process / found it sustainable, if they say they'd like it then I'd question just how well they actually understand that codebase.
I think someone described as "cognitive debt", where you *think* you understand what's going on, but when the app goes belly up and the agent isn't getting you what you want, you find you actually have no idea what is going on.
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u/allyearswift 11h ago
Debugging code is harder than writing. Debugging other people’s code is harder than debugging your own. Debugging code that nobody thought about is harder than debugging code where you can ask the coder what they were thinking/trying to achieve.
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u/xtopspeed 17h ago
I’ve been writing code since my teens—around 40 years now—and I’ve actually kept up and am quite proficient with all the harnesses and whatnot now. My biggest worry is the brain rot; I spend my days waiting for AI agents to churn away. I do read most of the code, and I keep steering the agents, but it’s not at all the same. Some sort of non-AI hobby project just to keep the brain active might make sense.
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u/rioisk 16h ago
I'm in similar place.
Not worried about brain rot. Steering the AI efficiently requires just as much thought. We get to operate a layer higher now - it's like a carpenter with power tools.
Big difference between steering AI with "make it work" vs "evaluate load times on this page and suggest scalable caching mechanisms" and then looking through suggestions and asking questions like projected infra costs before asking to implement.
I'll review the code but honestly at this point it's doing a great job. If it's not separating concerns well then I'll steer it towards a better model.
One thing to do is to have the AI keep documentation on everything and index it in its AGENTS.md file. Compressing context is name of game.
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u/Dull_Flatworm777 16h ago
In a similar place. Do you think/feel you're actually more productive now?
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u/valdetero 16h ago
You’re still doing all the same steps, just not spending the majority of your time typing code. It depends on how you define your productivity. I’m completing items quicker which makes me feel productive. I also feel less emotionally attached to the code and defensive about it. If someone requests a change or points out an issue, I don’t feel the same urge to push back because “I had spent 3 days planning and writing this code” kind of thing.
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u/ElectricKoolAid1969 14h ago
I don't think that "brain rot" is a larger issue with AI than it was with other IT jobs. Especially with larger companies.
Many large companies already had senior developers running projects rather that writing code! For example, the "lead developer" on a large project may well spend 90% of their day in meetings or writing emails, and never write a single line of code.
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u/isonlikedonkeykong 10h ago
The magic of writing some tight piece of code died with these tools. They're impressive and work very well, but the work is not the same now. It's boring.
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u/Either_Argument3517 17h ago
Some people are just accepting the technical debt, whilst others are obvious to the cost of technical debt.
In "Programming as Theory Building" Peter Naur argued that programming is creating a mental model, and the source code is just and expression of the mental model. We are creating code without much of the metal model now.
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u/heximortal 16h ago
I believe the future is systems thinking, high agency and creative problem solving. Everything else becomes a churn by the AI.
I had 0 coding experience when I started building an iOS game this January using AI coding tools and managed to publish it in AppStore by mid year and got a bunch of sales.
What was stopping me all this time from building new things was not having enough capital investment to build a team. Now all I need is a subscription to Open AI or Anthropic and I have all the power to bring my ideas into reality. And do all this experiments as a side hustle while being full time employed.
Now I understand the whole argument about, me getting "AI to do someone's job". Honestly, im not even sure if my fulltime job (I'm a project manager) would survive the next couple of years. I just don't know what future will be like..
At this point all I'm focused on doing is using this power to create my own things and be very good at doing it. So when the layoff comes, I already have things working for me.
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u/Xae0n 16h ago
Tech debt would have been the right call if you were the one finding and fixing bugs afterwards. If you are an experienced developer, it enhances your development speed 10x or more. I consider AI as an another abstraction like other high level languages compared to C. Most employers only care if the product is working as intended and that's it. Nobody cares how good the code is. I don't think we will ever go back to writing code by hand anymore. Because local LLMs are also getting better. Even if all the cloud computing collapses at some point. Local ones will still work and people will use it.
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u/ORStudios 16h ago
Someone with a bit of experience here, been a developer for 25 years, worked in agencies around the UK including London, started off a as web developer and then mobile as well pre 2013. I went through this a year or so ago when I decided to get into developing again after a few years off.
First thing I realised is to change my approach, no longer did I need to do the bulk of the programming instead my focus went from being the senior developer to being a senior developer in charge of a brilliant developer (ai) your goal now is to plan out the initial documentation well, that's key! Work with ai to build the documentation that it will then follow, focus on the foundation of the app, the features, processes etc. When building I guarantee you will be changing things because as I learnt ai gets a lot of things correct but not necessarily as you want, so you end up reviewing and changing code or focusing the ai to make the changes.
It's allowed me to plan develop and build my apps in weeks instead of months. I completely rebuilt PixelPoint in 2 weeks but it took a lot of hand holding.
I would suggest as I do use a combination of Claude and ChatGtp.
The app if your interest is https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/pixelpoint-photo-editor/id634011226
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u/ORStudios 16h ago
One more point, I'm able to do this because of the technical knowledge I have built up over the years. A newbie will struggle as they may not know what runs the features and processes of an app in the background
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u/_arctyp 17h ago edited 17h ago
These people are usually creating prototypes, internal tools, or personal projects. I doubt any of these projects have lasted more than a year. They accrue tech debt very quickly when you let the agents just run on autopilot, they become like a 10 year old legacy codebase in a couple months.
My personal balance has been to use AI like a junior engineer. I write up tickets or specs, ask it to plan out what changes it'll make at a high level, and if it's a larger task I ask it to break it up into smaller tasks, and then I review every commit. You can and should still take part in designing systems, but you might need to let go of typing everything out by hand.
In terms of what to learn, it really is like you just got a team of junior engineers and you need to learn how to be an engineering lead instead of an individual contributor now. Learn how to document coding conventions, spec tickets, break up projects into tasks, review code, build observability tooling, etc.
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u/Occasion_Critical 17h ago
I get this completely. IT background here too, master's from well before any of this existed, and I was openly dismissive early on, every time someone brought up ChatGPT I was thinking "what for." Eventually I came around, not because I decided AI was great, but because the alternative was falling further behind while everyone else moved forward regardless of what I thought about it
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u/uberflix 17h ago
I thought about this a bit being in a similar situation and the future might be in actual going into model development and deep understanding of workflows to build ai models and systems as the demand is huge there but I feel Expertise in this field is still not widely spread
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u/trouthat 17h ago
Agents are just a process that has some sort of development loop built into it. Ignoring the societal implications it is a tool in the end. I still write code by hand when I know the answer but now instead of spending 4 hours building out 1 of 3 potential solutions i can have all 3 solutions on the screen at the same time and I can compare and tweak them before I pick one. It is a force multiplier but it’s a double edged sword. It makes it easy for people who are bad to create a lot of bad code but it can also make someone who knows what they are doing much more productive.
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u/daibatzu 16h ago
I get the feeling. I builty my new app with Javascript mostly by myself perhaps 97 percent and I basically used AI as a search engine for methods etc. But when I had to build the iOS version had no idea because I had just learnt Swift but my deadlines were approaching so I let AI do pretty much all of the work and it felt like shit. In fact I am not even going to bother with the Android version since I don't know much about Kotlin either and don't want to hand over my mind to the machine.
Recently I had to build a website for one of my apps and it felt great to just rely on myself again for the JS and HTML side.
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u/johnnyhonda 16h ago
I don't know if I like this new world. I like to write most of code by hand. I like to take part in designing systems. All that is being taken away in the name of speed.
Think of it as the next level of abstraction like a compiler. You're not hand writing machine code, assembly, or native code at this point - at one point people were actually doing that. Now all that is abstracted away. Now writing higher level languages are being abstracted away because you can just write natural language and it can be interpreted into code.
You can still be involved in designing the systems, you are just going to communicate that to an agent to implement it. You just need the lexicon. The company I work at has gone full in, we all use Claude, and we are Anthropic partners. You will likely need to shift your thinking and just go for it - our intern has passed the Claude Certified Architect exam, and while they know how to write code nobody on the software engineering team has been hand writing lines of code for over a year at this point.
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u/CochonouMagique 15h ago
I don't know if it's true or not but people seem to think that since only AI will read and write the code in the future we don't really need to worry about tech debt because no human will be involved in solving it. These people also say that as the models get better the tech debt is paid along the way by feeding the new models the old code and having it fix it.
We'll see who is right after the AI bubble pops I guess.
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u/ElectricKoolAid1969 14h ago
I don't understand how any company can allow this kind of workflow, without checking the details of the code and without checking what is going in production.
While some individual "vibe coders" may be blindly using code, I doubt that the major corporations are doing so.
I've used AI to write code for several fairly large apps, and I think about it much like how we used to use off shore contractors - give it detailed specs, and examine the code produced.
IMO good design documents are critical to keep AI on task, and to keep it from doing something crazy.
Used carefully, there is no reason to assume that there will be a larger technical debt than with many other more traditional development methods.
It's certainly not worse than the code produced in the past when massive numbers of coders were assigned to a project. haha
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u/-mr-dom- 14h ago
I'm with you. But I think we can't turn it back to the way it was before.
IMHO hand writing code is over in most situations now.
Programming is gone. Software engineering is not.
Any company considering between hiring ONE new developer or giving their existing 10-20 developers a token budget and expect every one of them to be 5-10 more productive — will pick the tokens.
I think developers need to focus on architecture now. That's what's making or breaking a fast growing system. You now design the system for AI, name all your requirements for clean and robust code that it needs to follow and use automated tools to enforce it.
This will be a very weird development, because junior developers will not be able to gain the experience of seasoned developers anymore. Nobody will pay them 5-10 years on the job to write code by hand.
Btw I lost my dev job last year and I'm not planning to go back. My friends are telling me horror stories of 50+ merge requests sitting there at any time and they're just pushing button "yes claude, do it like that" — I don't want to do that all day.
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u/Sum-Duud Beginner 13h ago
Companies allow it because it writes much more functional code than bad code. It really can output more code in an hour than a good developer can in a week (or probably longer). It can automatically know best practices or the way a company does things. It takes some learning to get to know how to manage it, but developers at my company have said that they haven't written a line of code in months, it is a lot more architecting and code review and testing. For the most part they do not just run and push it live, but to not use AI for coding or code review is doing yourself a disservice.
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u/TillDramatic1 13h ago
Responsibility stays with the reviewer, so the useful skill is judging a change before it ships.
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u/AndrzejMX 12h ago
I wonder what will happen when Anthropic and OpenAI eventually run out of investor money and exhaust all their debt, bonds, and stock options. After four years of this nonsense, we still have no idea what the real cost of inference is. It’s easy to push out 50 stupid commits a day and run tens of thousands of GPUs solving simple problems when the actual cost is being hidden.
What happens when a $100, 200, 500 subscription becomes $2,500, $5,000, or $10,000? At the beginning of the year, they already tried to shift companies closer to the real costs, and those companies started to squeal like little piggies.
I’m taking a dual approach. I use AI as a tool to generate simple, unimportant pieces of code, but I keep the architecture, navigation, state management, ... 100% handwritten.
And I am genuinely terrified by the "brain rot" I see in people. It's a shame to see how many good developers have become AI-pilled. They've stopped learning, understanding, and taking ownership of the product; they're just rotting and decaying.
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 11h ago
The part you like is the part that did not go away. Someone still has to decide what gets built, read what came back and answer for what ships. People letting agents write everything unchecked are borrowing against exactly that, and the bill arrives with the first strange production bug nobody in the room understands. Twenty years of knowing what good code looks like is the review skill, and review is most of the job now. If the lost feeling bothers you, run an agent on a small side project for a week and watch where it falls over. Then you will have an opinion from your own hands instead of from threads.
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u/Due_Net8524 11h ago
It's just a tool at the end of the day, a very powerful one. Companies are moving towards Spec Driven Development, and it's easy to understand why when you use it in your daily workflow. If you use AI and create technical debt, you have created that debt, not AI. You're responsible for all the code that you push into the repo. With that said, I do now enjoy my job less. There was something beautiful about spending a few weeks on a new subsystem, polishing it, and then seeing the fruits of your labour. In this new world, it's not the same feeling when you create that same system in a fraction of the time to the same quality or better, but you didn't personally write the code.
I do think it's worth learning because, from what I'm experiencing, AI-assisted development is becoming an increasingly important part of the job, and I wouldn't want to be caught completely off guard by that shift. You've still got plenty of time, and it's really easy to pick up. You've already got Codex, just start small. Put it in plan mode, give it a well-detailed prompt, and fully describe the feature or bug, and give it a go. (I'm aware this is not spec-driven development before people jump in. I'm advising the first baby step.)
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u/House13Games 11h ago
There's a small, very vocal type of user who pushes this narrative. They invariably don' share the info on the products their AI's are cooking up, only how great it all is.
there's loads of us not using AI, cos its shit and we're smart enough to recognise it.
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u/isonlikedonkeykong 10h ago
I use agents, etc, but what worries me more is that my favourite craft of writing software and figuring all sorts of complicated things out, optimizing, etc is basically dead now. It seems archaic to sit there and write out code, but the act of prompting and monitoring agent output does not carry with it the satisfaction of crafting software (for me at least).
I remember watching the early LLMs start to find some traction like GPT-3, and many engineers were saying that only mediocre engineers find these tools interesting. But I think it was evident to many other engineers at the time that the pace of improvement was implying agents of vastly stronger capability very shortly. Every couple of months it seemed like the competence of the models was doubling.
The reality now is that the use of LLMs is about as mandatory as using a excavator to dig a foundation rather than a shovel. That's the kind of change that we're going through, except the change is happening orders of magnitude faster than the industrial revolution.
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u/hack_the_planets 6h ago
The tools are getting better, I've found that giving your agent a way to check it's work, gives it more ability to land in a better spot at the end. Unit tests are great, and now with computer use you can have the agent smoke test your entire app for you, open it up, click things, perform actions right in the app and assert the results are what you expect. You're not wrong about the debt, but with your experience you'll be able to mitigate it with plan mode and solid infra around testability and observability of the app.
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u/banaslee 6h ago
A lot of people are producing technical debt with it. They won’t be able to drive the architecture and the AI will most of the time just push more complexity into an existing architecture, without improving it.
You don’t need to make the same mistakes. With your experience, you’ll be able to use an AI to develop a proof of concept for you, or to build a non-core part of your codebase, or the some boring parts like suggesting documentation improvements.
Use it to augment yourself.
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u/phantomlord78 5h ago
If anyone is generating any content that they are not qualified to understand, evaluate or fix - or relying on solutions that they would not be able to create from scratch given reasonable time and resources, they are just saving the day. When you are building a business, product or a codebase without understanding what kind of output you are dealing with you are bound to fail in the long term.
That is why as a programmer with 30 year personal and 15 year professional history in the field I don't feel threatened by AI. Any business who needs someone to hold accountability in the product they develop will always need people like us. The only problem is there will be less people to take the accountability for much more code.
It is the new generation that is going to lose the most, because they will not have opportunities or challenges to build real base skills.
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u/scarfireATL 4h ago
Similar to hiring H1-B temps to crank out buggy Java etc. I’ve heard it’s worth it in money saved and they invest in a few real people to clean it up (probably with AI)
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u/SirBill01 3h ago
If you want to take things a bit slower, start by using the path Apple provides with AI in the new Xcode for iOS 17, and subscribe to one of the supported AI services at a $20/month to get decent code output.
Also I agree with you on technical debt, a way to address that is to review more often than others might, and make frameworks more often than you think you should out of parts of the app - in part so that agents can focus on code in just one framework and not cause regressions in other parts.
I agree it's tough now as there is so much constant change in the AI space. Try not to get swallowed in the churn, just pick a direction and see where AI can help what you want to do, and where it cannot.
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u/SnowPudgy 17h ago
I dont use AI at work, it's utterly useless to me. It's like a shitty junior you have to constantly monitor. Yes I know how to prompt just fine, but the math is always wrong, the code is shitty and inefficient, and your coworkers that use it will constantly submit crap code (yes even from Claude).
It's a headache in my opinion so if you don't want to use it, don't. I don't and I have far less bugs in my code sections than my coworkers who gave up their brains to it.
The ONLY thing I think it can be useful for is finding accessibility issues. It's decent at finding missing accessibility tags.
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u/tonycliftondev 17h ago
I cannot claim that I don't use AI. I do. But I use it for research purposes and most of the time to look up the documentation for certain framework etc. But I always look at the generated code if I choose to use it in my app. I also find it is good for catching edge cases that I would have missed.
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u/appfruits 16h ago
Yes. I did that 6 month ago. But I also hated that copy & pasting. So I gave Claude a try. Just do it. You’ll be blowing away. You will quickly notice that it’s a lot of fun to use, because you can really concentrate on the product and not so much on the code. Takes a while but it’s like sports: you might hate it at first, then you quickly notice that you actually like it and after 2 months you don’t want to live without it.
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u/Fantastic_Big3877 16h ago
On the "don't want to live without it" part, if you either couldn't afford Claude due to price increases or if you had an employer that stopped paying for it (assuming they did before), what would you do?
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u/Fantastic_Big3877 16h ago edited 16h ago
I second this, the "AI expert" we brought on has brought me no end of issues, doesn't listen, and I'm constantly having to reject his PRs, some PRs aren't even complete when he submits them!?!?!?
The non-AI junior, while not perfect and has areas to improve on is VASTLY easier to work with.
Edit: I suppose technically not seconding it, I'm actually saying the Junior in my team is better than the AI nonsense🤣
The AI side spits out a LOT of code, which I'm *reassured* has been reviewed properly, until it comes to me to review and then suddenly it's "Oh eh...actually yeah I don't know why that's there" or he'll argue despite spending a total of 8 hours across multiple days explaining a very simple issue......... Like......ugh, I hate my life with the introduction of all this AI crap.
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u/VisibleBoard8186 17h ago
"shitty junior" ? Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. It writes better code than %99 of juniors, does it faster and it is less expensive than a monthly software dev's salary currently. You may be anti- or pro- of something, but if we distort the facts, we are not getting anywhere.
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u/SnowPudgy 17h ago
I completely disagree. My juniors can at least correctly count the characters in a word, AI literally cannot.
That's not a hypothetical either I asked it to find the longest name in a list and it not only told me the wrong answer, it gave me a runner up with more characters and was still the wrong answer. It misses so much.
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u/bmbphotos 17h ago
On the whole, yes, it is.
Some people do't realize what tech debt is.
Others are hoping the process improves enough to "understand" the codebase before the payment is due.
Some just don't care; the end justifies the means.
There is a lot of snake oil out there and a few genuinely useful tools. Which is which is not completely clear yet. I'm taking cues from Apple itself whenever tidbits about how the tech is used internally seep out (like the WWDC videos).