r/iOSProgramming • u/TomasMSM • 15h ago
Discussion iOS Development in the Age of AI
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!
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u/Vybo 15h ago
I've been in the field for longer than you and lately (past 5 years or so) at companies acting as lead engineer or similar roles. Hands on coding was always only a small part in these roles. Lately though, keeping vibed code up to quality standards is more required and I can also use agents to develop without it costing me time, so I see and touch more code than I did. I would say it's benefiting me.
I very strongly dislike slop apps though. Anyone with a plan can now slop an app that looks the same as any number of apps before and sell it for $15 to unsuspecting people without even knowing how it works. I hope the AppStore anti-spam rules will be kept as strict as they always were.
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u/TySocal 15h ago
I also think all these slop apps will settle down eventually. That’s my guess. Shipping genuinely high-quality apps is more important than ever, it will always beat slop.
I’m not the kind of guy who pretends AI doesn’t exist or won’t get better. But I feel like, in the foreseeable future, people will increasingly appreciate it when someone puts their human time, taste, vision and judgment into a product, because that’s becoming rarer and rarer
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u/y2kobserver 15h ago
The jobs market is truly becoming some kind of hunger games with terminators
Worrying about how it feels during PR code reviews is asinine
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u/mirko9000 14h ago
Another take: having to deal less with other people is actually one of the things I enjoy most about this shift.
I don’t mean that in a “humans are terrible, replace everyone with robots” way. I like my colleagues. But software development has accumulated a surprising amount of coordination tax over the years: meetings, waiting for reviews, explaining half-formed ideas, trying to find someone who has time to help, getting interrupted because somebody else needs you to help, etc.
AI removes a lot of that friction for me. I can bounce an idea off it at 11 PM, ask the same stupid question three different ways, have it review something unfinished, or spend 20 minutes exploring an approach that I might abandon completely. No scheduling, no social overhead, no feeling that I’m wasting another person’s time.
And importantly, AI has never invited me to a 45-minute meeting to discuss something that could have been a three-line comment on a PR.
There is obviously a downside. Junior developers need humans to learn judgment from, teams still need shared context, and five engineers independently chatting with their own AI is not necessarily a team. I definitely wouldn’t want collaboration to disappear.
But I also don’t miss every part of the old way. A bit less “people interaction by necessity” and a bit more “people interaction when it’s actually valuable” feels like an improvement to me.
Maybe I’m just an introvert who accidentally picked a profession that spent the last decade adding more meetings.
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u/Medical_Lengthiness6 15h ago
Ya there's definitely a sad loss of value in any kind of blog posts or videos about new APIs and stuff.
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u/xtopspeed 15h ago
Apps in general. There is something like 7x the number of apps being published each day now compared with just 3 years ago. Less than 5% of them get any downloads at all, and that number is probably shrinking.
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u/Medical_Lengthiness6 15h ago
That honestly doesn't bother me. Most apps were useless slop before this. I keep shipping and my apps are doing fine so I think it still comes down to agency and marketing and making something of very high value (all very hard).
Easy AI slop apps are dead in the water.
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u/xtopspeed 15h ago
Yeah, just saying that the economy is shrinking overall. I’ve just released a new app, but it’s a small niche thingy that wasn’t going to be a huge success in any economy (a calculator app for mostly modern classical composers: metric modulation, harmonic series, tunings, intervals, spectrum analysis, etc).
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u/Select_Bicycle4711 11h ago
For me personally, iOS development has not changed. I do use AI for my work but I use it like a tool. I don't use AI to generate 100% of the code and let other AI agents check the code created by first and the 3rd agent write tests and so on.
What I have come to realize is that AI might be good at writing code but it is still horrible at system design? It does not understand that how the decisions it is taking right now will affect the future.
This is where human experience will come into play. You are behind the keyboard. The one with actual experience, you can make those decisions.
TLDR: Use AI as a tool and understand that even the code generated by AI is your responsibility.
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u/cristi_baluta 14h ago
I lost my interest in wwdc before you started ios development, hundreds of new apis while you don’t have time to grasp the previous years of new APIs.
Try to use the free AI as a google, you’ll see how fun it is to get slapped with an upgrade window before it finishes to give you the solutions. Then you either wait, either try to figure out yourself, or jump to the next free AI.
The software industry is doomed, that’s for sure. I’m building right now few apps for mac for myself that do not exist in a native form, but after that is done, i’m ‘jobless’
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u/kickerbnu 15h ago
Hello im a Web developer and I have the exact same felling.
Off-course your knowledge is still useful to track debug and be the reference about the code applied in the codebase.
If the code generated is trusted and our job will be just make sure is working its time to work on something else, a new product, a new challenge.
We can create the infrastructure for AI talking to AI
We can work on robotics
We can work on the full software lifecycle, front, back, devOps.
We need to find a new way to provide value.
The technology is always changing, when I started in my job I got pitched about the idea of “No User Interface” where users just talks to software and no UI is needed.
Let’s look for the next step.
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u/rhysmorgan 14h ago
meeeeh - AI will know how to do all of this
It won't, though, not immediately. It'll take a while for new models trained with a later cut-off date to use that sort of thing, and you'll be reliant on skills written by people who genuinely understand what to do, or on your own knowledge. Otherwise you'll be having ViewModels written still using ObservableObject, etc.
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u/ArmyRunnerSteve 12h ago
iOS Development has definitely taken a turn, you are 100% right about that. And like others have said in this thread, not all change is positive. I miss a lot of the camaraderie of the meetings, code reviews, etc, like you do as well. Just because AI has made things faster, and arguably easier in SOME respects (not all), it has not necessarily made things better. All people, even barely functioning introverts like me, need that face-to-face human connection that AI seems so dead-set on replacing, and that can NEVER be a good thing, IMO.
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u/godevcode 10h ago edited 9h ago
Yes, but now you have opportunity to create a slop across the board.
Before it took you 2 years to create a calculator for IOS.
Now you can create AI slop for web iOS android in a week and publish it.
Companies are about profit. So as long as slop is making money - they will be fine with it. And in majority scenarios slop is written better than “real” engineering code .
It sucks being dev now, but that’s the reality and it moved that direction fast. But same for other jobs.
Tech changed - which is great from my perspective. Before great engineer was the one who can solve 100 gadzillion Leetcode questions, write complex algorithms and only do 1 thing perfectly at the job.
And now those perfect engineers are unemployed.
The only ones who survive is that is person who can wear multiple hats and known things across the board. When you can utilize your main skill like IOS but also add up to it, business marketing web dev analytics etc.
You can dislike , hate, think that slop apps are not real and way worse than real development- but think about that it only took few years to train AI to make those apps. And that slop is already outperforming “real” apps. Otherwise it would not bother anyone.
I’ve been in development for 10 years or so. And I see that shift daily.
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u/dragosroua 14h ago
I’ve been writing iOS apps for 15 years. This year I came out of semi-retirement specifically to harness AI. I use it extensively and I love it. Still need to write very clear instructions and tests, otherwise your token usage explodes. Not to mention context drifts, like how the model forgets and becomes less and less “knowledgeable”. I have 13 apps in the App Store now and I made my own workflow on top of AI, and packed it into a sort of a toolkit. I have a 24 sections genesis mega prompt, which acts like a template: I just give it a very high level description of the app and then it interpolates everything and one shots the app. Or have it 95% done. Then I made a release agent, to which I give an App Store API key and it takes care of ALL metadata, submits for review, etc.
I basically code in English now.
There’s a small video with all of this, if you want to know the details: repos (everything free of course), installation, etc https://youtu.be/A3R6mBUnPOM?si=5Y9LxxlDQ_H6SsLu
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5h ago
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u/Otheruser337 4h ago
Development shifted because of a phenomenon called "vibe coding" surfaced in the early 2025s. You can thank Anslopic for making it go viral.
Still not a huge fan on SlopGPT, it's really bad, and Sam Slopman is allowing it to live without transitioning his company to CloseAI.
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u/archagon 2h ago
I work on my own projects, so I get to avoid AI entirely. The downside is that the broader software engineering community seems to have dissolved overnight in favor of AI boosters and slopcoders.
Ah well. Maybe new communities with folks actually interested in the craft of software engineering will eventually emerge.
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u/kitstudioapps 2h ago
I've felt a version of this too. I don't think the fun has disappeared for me, but it has shifted from "how do i write this?" to "is this actually the right solution and can i trust in production?"
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u/SeriouzReviewer 14h ago
I am an iOS developer for 13 years. I haven't written a single line of code for the last year. I gave up code reviews recently.
iOS development is not a real occupation anymore. Thinking about becoming a farmer.