6 ms·

We did the same thing - had 90% of it overnight. Then spent a few days in the background tweaking for polish. Our app is smaller, and has about 15-20 screens.

• greenowl 24d ago
  And people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...
  • mattm 24d ago
    This is a type of project that likely wouldn't have been done before AI
    • eleventen 24d ago
      Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.
      • enraged_camel 24d ago
        >> Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The parent's point is that AI lowers the cost/benefit ratio drastically, by reducing the cost. So companies that would have shied away from projects like this pre-AI are now pulling the trigger without much hesitation.
        • hamandcheese 23d ago
          And what a lot of people seem to miss is that with AI, there is going to be (already is?) orders of magnitude more software in this world. I'm sure a lot of jobs will be eliminated, but new jobs will be created as well. Hopefully enough to balance things out, but we'll see.
        • rrr_oh_man 23d ago
          > The parent's point is that AI lowers the cost/benefit ratio drastically, by reducing the cost. …as long as Claude is still subsidized…
          • player1234 23d ago
            [dead]
      • spiderice 24d ago
        > Some companies would decide not to bother Sounds like you agree
        • eleventen 23d ago
          I agree that AI is suppressing developer wage growth and taking real jobs. The opposite argument is being made elsewhere in the thread, and I think that argument is wrong.
  • exe34 24d ago
    It ported overnight. I don't think it would create from scratch without a lot of hand holding.
    • greenowl 24d ago
      Previous company I worked for would have (and did) hire dedicated swift/java mobile developers to build and maintain ios and android native versions (largely porting functionality from an existing web application) Not anymore.
      • organsnyder 24d ago
        That's fairly rare. Most companies would use a compatibility layer instead.
        • josephg 24d ago
          Really? I’ve worked with plenty of companies that had separate native iOS & Android teams. I don’t know any that use a compatibility layer. Unless by compatibility layer, you mean a web view.
      • atonse 24d ago
        What's more likely (as others have said) is that the other thousand companies that can't afford to have dedicated staff would've just used React Native. So no jobs were lost, they weren't there in the first place. The places that have dedicated Swift/Java devs can now be more ambitious in what they build.
    • tonyedgecombe 23d ago
      This does seem like the kind of task LLM's are ideal for. Just like that port of Bun from one language to another.
  • deleted 24d ago
    [deleted]
  • augment_me 24d ago
    This is an incredibly boring task. Nothing new, just rewrite everything to just see it all rewritten again in 1 year. Perfect for LLMs and something humans shouldn't do.
    • boringg 24d ago
      While I agree with that statement -- that is also a lot of jobs. We have a lot of humans -- not every single developer sits in the innovation seat. The fewer the jobs available the less employable humans. I think that rewrite - if AI enabled - owes its thanks to the legion of individuals who put their code up on the internet in the first place. Weird times.
      • doc_ick 24d ago
        Unfortunately theres no thanks to the suppliers of training data. US courts made sure there’s no recompense for them, and likely never will be. Seems similar to eminent domain, but without limitations.
    • cheema33 24d ago
      > This is an incredibly boring task. We all want super exciting jobs. But plenty have boring jobs like this. Between not having a job or having a boring job that pays well, the choice is obvious for many of us.
      • 8n4vidtmkvmk 23d ago
        Are you defending doing boring work? I personally never minded doing migrations. I guess I don't really have to anymore though. Weird.
        • pjmlp 23d ago
          The problem is that in many companies doing migrations would be the only job, thus now there is none.
    • deleted 24d ago
  • wccrawford 24d ago
    While I mostly agree with you, this is the kind of thing that might not have been done if the AI couldn't do the heavy lifting. They had previously chosen React Native because it was easier for programmers to keep it updated, since it was really just 1 codebase. With AI, those same programmers can do the more difficult version, keeping the native apps updated separately. So did it kill a job, or did it make it possible for the existing programmers to do it better? It's the kind of thing that is really hard to determine in general, but here, it really does sound like they only made the change because it became possible with existing resources. They would not have done it otherwise.
    • bgirard 23d ago
      That's an example of AI growing the sector that can lead to more jobs. Because suddenly a lot of tasks that weren't economically viable are now going to be in demand. Custom software for small businesses, platform specific optimized code instead of cross platform software, etc...
    • aenis 23d ago
      In case of my company, the port was planned for this year, with a 9 month timeline and about 10 FTE team. It ended up being done in 3 months, with 2 engineers. (Sure, plus testers and internal bureaucracies, but that 2 FTE for 3 months vs. 10 FTE for 9 forecasted is apples-to-apples). Sure its eating up SWE jobs.
  • dlisboa 24d ago
    The optimistic outlook: Just like this has made Web devs into Mobile devs, so could Mobile devs leverage AI to work in Web shops. I'm not an optimist but there could be an increase of available apps being created which would still keep people employed. Theoretically the cost of creating an iOS app for a company without an engineering team dropped from several hundreds of thousand to a few thousand or hundreds, which could be paid out to a freelancer with AI. More people would go into freelancing for industries which were not contemplated before due to cost. But I'm not an optimist.
  • lnrd 24d ago
    This app has 15/20 screens, an app this small wouldn't employ many people to begin with. Before there was one guy (op) maintaining it in react native and now he maintains it native. I don't see much change tbh.
• alostpuppy 24d ago
  This has been my conclusion as well. Agentic workflows drops the effort level in keeping two native code bases in sync.
  • sprite 24d ago
    Same conclusion here. My current preferred setup is native for iOS and Android with common core in rust exposed through uniffi
    • asdfsa32 24d ago
      I was surprised by your comments and then you do Rust to be called via Java or Kotlin and Swift? What does your app do?
      • sprite 23d ago
        Yes uniffi created swift and kotlin bindings. The app I did with this is just a sudoku game https://www.puzzlesight.com https://www.puzzlesight.com . Before AI I would have reached for something like Flutter to avoid doing all work twice but with AI doing two apps makes more sense.
        • asdfsa32 23d ago
          Okay, makes sense, the whole thing looks and screams vibe coded. On a beefy machine, navigating between your website pages takes 2-3 seconds. So still a long way to go with AI.
          • sprite 23d ago
            Interesting, it's instant on mine. The landing page is just Astro with cloudflare in front of it, the origin server is a hetzner box in Germany though.
• jgalt212 24d ago
  And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?
  • exe34 24d ago
    The value of most companies/apps are in the relationship with the customers, so it's the database, not the code.
    • stwrt 24d ago
      Definitely agree. Most developers could build a basic Twitter or Facebook clone. The hard part is getting the users, content, and relationships that make the product worth coming back to.
      • IslandRebel 23d ago
        It is both tbh. Anyone can build a poor clone of an application. However there are many things that you don't realise is happening beneath the scene. It is all the small things e.g. YouTube Mobile website works really well when you have a inconsistent connection compared to the alternatives such as Odysee, Rumble, Kick and Twitch. I can listen to a live stream or a video style podcast in the car and YouTube will resume the connection properly as long as the browser tab on my phone hasn't gone to sleep. Kick will just stop, if it is a replay it will resume from the start of the stream after rewinding the stream a few seconds while attempting playback. While the code to do this isn't that difficult. YouTube has bothered to deal with the edge case of someone like me driving through an area with inconsistent connection while running their mobile site (not even their app). Whenever people try to use alternatives, they often complain about poor reliability of the app. A lot of the clones are losing users and I doubt they really even know they are doing it.
        • exe34 23d ago
          Is all this praise of YouTube on android or ios?
• fourside 24d ago
  How are you evaluating the Android build if you don’t use Android and you don’t know Kotlin?
  • user43928 24d ago
    You just install it on your phone and use the app. Maintainability concerns are entirely overblown by people who don't use agentic AI to develop large mobile apps, but anyway give their opinion as if they had that experience. I put in a few hundred hours, and I reached the same conclusion as Shopify. With reviews from other models and then a manual QA pass the result is fully usable.
    • masom 24d ago
      > You just install it on your phone and use the app. OP says they don't have an android phone...
      • arkits 24d ago
        Android studio has a emulator
        • atonse 23d ago
          I used the emulator - but just like I can use an iOS app for 30 seconds and tell you whether it feels native or not, I can't do the same for Android, since I'm not a daily user of Android phones. And in the past, I didn't care because when I was manually building the app, I would just do my best with react native. But now that I can actually sweat the details (with the help of agents), I do want to hear from android users and use as many OS-native APIs and features.
      • user43928 24d ago
        I missed that. I'd order a cheap Android phone to have a device in hand instead of working only with the simulator.
• zx8080 24d ago
  [flagged]
• larodi 24d ago
  React native is an obstacle compared to what clear Swift/Kotlin code may produce. Swift is very powerful and Kotlin, in all honesty, is the first reasonable and very useful thing to come to the JRE ecosystem (save for Scala, which is, well, quite complex still). Myself turned some python code to Swift, and keep doing so, without trouble or pressure. Of course, I've been doing fair amount of systems programming for 20 years now, so not sure what to advice newcomers. But this approach to dev DOES work for me very well.
  • doc_ick 24d ago
    Sounds like the advice to newcomers is to not worry about trying to learn a programming language. There already is an llm to program for you, and do it better than you could, so just learn how to talk.
    • teleforce 23d ago
      Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it - Perlis. [1] Epigrams in Programming: https://engineering.yale.edu/academic-study/departments/computer-science/about/epigrams-programming https://engineering.yale.edu/academic-study/departments/comp...
• locallost 24d ago
  Next up, designing an even higher level language which will be used by LLMs to compile to high level languages like kotlin or swift. Just store instructions for LLMs in repos.
  • simonhamp 23d ago
    I hate to break it to you, but we already have it: it's called PHP
• asdfsa32 24d ago
  Codex with what model?
  • atonse 23d ago
    I think probably GPT 5.5, or 5.6 Sol - it was ~ 2 months ago. Each time I get access to a new model, I do two things on all our active codebases: - Security review of all the code and vulnerabilities (new models will find new stuff) - Code review of test suite quality, and idiomatic patterns/code for the language of that codebase. And in the case of swift and kotlin, it's even more important that an agent helps me with the code quality since I don't know what "idiomatic" swift or kotlin looks like, the way I do with JS, Elixir, C#, Ruby, etc.
    • Gunnerhead 19d ago
      Do you have good prompts to do both?
• ricardobeat 24d ago
  I assume having Kotlin and Jetpack Compose makes it much easier than it was back around 2020?
• nevertoolate 23d ago
  So now you have two vibe coded applications you don’t understand. I’m not an advocate of making “job security” decisions but this definitely goes to red flag territory. Was it your job to maintain the RN codebase or do you have other functions there as well? I’m not sure I would keep a native noob on a vibed native codebase. What is your take?
• ashishb 23d ago
  React native is broadly an inferior option. LLMs made it way worse https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/ https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/
  • avicado0o 23d ago
    this is from 2021....
    • myko 23d ago
      and still accurate in its conclusion, probably moreso today
• prisonguard 23d ago
  Congratulations, you now have 2 codebases to maintain.
• wouldbecouldbe 23d ago
  I thought the same, but then I build a few complicated apps and thought I could keep the different codebases stable but still was a headache, so switched web, ios, android all back to expo/rn. I love that testing is only (almost) only thing now, instead of 3 platforms.
• aenis 23d ago
  We did the same with our apps used by a few hundred thousand people a day. We are a slow, boring company, so the port took about 4 weeks of engineering work, and maybe 3 months taking into account release process and change management. But in fairness, we had the first working version after a day as well. This was in February, too, with substantially less capable models, unable to do overnight runs.