There is a major disruption happening in coding, and it affects every computer programmer employed today: AI-assisted coding. AI coding agents are readily available to help you code. These agents are masters of complex APIs, capable of understanding code logic, and familiar with a number of typical algorithms. This takes nearly all the tedium out of UI design, so you can concentrate on functionality and not the dreary process of trying to figure out new languages (like Swift) and constantly changing APIs (iOS APIs like SwiftUI are good examples). With this kind of AI agent, you can more quickly iterate on UX (User Experience).
I've been using the most advanced version of Anthropic Claude I can get my hands on to build apps, which is currently Claude Opus 4.5.
The upshot is this: it's actually fun to code again! Don't get me wrong -- I've always had fun coding. But this is a whole new level. And, of course, there were always things that weren't so fun to code. Where's the fun in interfacing to external databases?
You know what I don't miss? Having to support file formats. Particularly cases like this: archive the state of this app into a .plist and then unarchive it back. This is useful to support open and save (or just state save) for custom apps. Or how about this? Save the image to JPEG in Photos. Or in the Cloud. Use Files so I can access the image from my Mac.
I also don't miss having to read up on new UI, and look for well-hidden features that reside in subclasses, superclasses, and basically anywhere I'm not looking.
And when it's done, the feature works pretty well. But perhaps I've forgotten to do a "select all" when tapping a text field, or maybe I've forgotten that the keyboard takes up a lot of space and the entire app window needs to be pushed up so you can see what you're typing. All I had to do was describe what I wanted the behavior to be, and it made it work. That's just one example of iterating on User Experience.
And it wrote it all in Swift.
That's what I call convenience. It's a total disruption of the programming experience. I expect the typical programmer to be several times more effective and to be able to get jobs done faster. Hey -- maybe fewer programmers are needed to do a given mega-task.
It's true that sometimes Claude gets it wrong. Sometimes I need to back off the changes made as a response to the last prompt, and then tink a bit more carefully how to tell it exactly what I want.
When you're putting in UI (let's say icons), it's handy to know about SF Symbols and which ones are germane to your particular tool, command, or tab.
It really takes a lot of headaches out of coding!
