[travisgriggs]

I do a mix. The "program by painting" is great for some things and sucks for other things. Unfortunately, programming UIs entirely by text is terse for some things and incredibly laborious/tedious/boilerplate for others (e.g. doing autolayout in code sucks).

So I end up doing both. The problem (and I've seen this for many years with other similar systems), is that you have to become relatively comfortable with both approaches, so you can make informed decisions about when to flip back and forth. When can I do this with IB even though it's a teensy hacky vs when should I just subclass UIView and take over layoutSubviews and friends?

That's been my experience at least. YMMV.