| I have been using Claude this week the first time for a _slightly_ bigger SwiftUI project than just a few lines of bash or SQL I used it before. I have never used swift before but I am amazed how much Claude could do. It feels to me as we are at the point where anyone can now generate small tools with low effort for themselves. Maybe not production ready, but good enough to use yourself. It feels like it should be good enough to empower the average user to break out of having to rely on pre-made apps to do small things. Kind of like bash for the average Joe. What worked: - generated a mostly working PoC with minimal input and hallucinated UI layout, Color scheme, etc. this is amazing because it did not bombard me with detailed questions. It just carried on to provide me with a baseline that I could then finetune - it corrected build issues by me simply copy pasting the errors from Xcode
- got APIs working
- added debug code when it could not fix an issue after a few rounds - resolved an API issue after I pointed it to a typescript SDK to the API (I literally gave a link to the file and told it, try to use this to work out where the problem is)
- it produces code very fast What is not working great yet: - it started off with one large file and crashed soon after because it hit a timeout when regenerating the file. I needed to ask it to split the file into a typical project order - some logic I asked it to implement explicitly got changed at some point during an unrelated task. To prevent this in future I asked it mark this code part as important and that it should only be changed at explicit request. I don’t know yet how long this code will stay protected for - by the time enough context got build up usage warnings pop up in Claude - only so many files are supported atm So my takeaway is that it is very good at translating, I.e. API docs into code, errors into fixes. There is also a fine line between providing enough context and running out of tokens. I am planning to continue my project to see how far I can push it. As I am getting close to the limit of the token size now, I am thinking of structuring my app in a Claude friendly way: - clear internal APIs. Kind of like header files so that I can tell Claude what functions it can use without allowing it to change them or needing to tokenize the full source code - adversarial testing. I don’t have tests yet, but I am thinking of asking one dedicated instance of Claude to generate tests. I will use other Claude instances for coding and provide them with failing test outputs like I do now with build errors. I hope it will fix itself similarly. |