Apple has relaxed the guidelines for developer tools compared to the early days of the App Store. If you look today there are Python IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and various other apps that execute user generated code. The key guideline to be mindful of is 2.5.2.

Totally! I have the same use case when I’m, say, at the park supervising my kids.

You can export your entire project as a single swift file from the share sheet. This makes it pretty straightforward to import the code into an Xcode project when you’re back at your Mac

One clarification: we did not rebuild any of the frameworks. As quickly as possible, the interpreter calls out to the compiled frameworks in the OS. So Bitrig is calling into the real SwiftUI, the real Foundation, the real MapKit, etc.

Wow that's really high praise. Thank you.

Don't tell anyone, but once you're on the paid plan we're not actually enforcing the 100 message limit right now ;)

We're still in the learning phase, and are going to adjust the plans based on exactly the kind of considerations you're raising

Your secret is safe, hah! It's almost like you need an intermediate 'cheap/dumb' AI as a proxy to flesh everything out ahead of sending it off to be coded ... something that crisps up all the requirement and ultimately crafts a more cost-effective and likely all-around-better prompt. Even being semi-technical, I'm always surprised how much the details matter when describing something to AI (e.g., the fireworks should only explode _outward_, not inward, lol). Thanks!

There's a lot I want to do to improve the prompting experience. As I mentioned in the original post, it's very simple right now.

There's a lot of inspiration we could (and probably will) draw from other products (e.g. Cline's Plan vs Act modes) to build what you're describing.

It can also be really fun and productive to just rapidly iterate on what the AI gives back, without having to take the time to describe it all up front. Sometimes this approach can lead to a new directions you might not have thought of.

Version 1.0 is never perfect. I’m enjoying the app so far. My suggestion is to offer an Ai Prompt Builder as one of the starter apps. Just a walkthrough of the basics of what the user hopes to be built. I sent an email with my version of the prompt builder. I have made a few revisions to make it more concise and focused. I have several ideas that I would be happy to send over in an email.

Ya, I agree it makes sense for us to record a more tutorial length demo at this point and we can show off things like that.

Thanks for the tip about the mic. Fun fact: it's me in the video, but it's Jacob doing the narration :P

Thanks for the heads up. I confess, I did not test it on an SE. We'll take a look!

I always do my dev testing on the smallest and largest iPhones. I recommend going with smallest only as your primary driver if you don’t make use of the sidebar behaviors on the largest ones.

You can edit the code directly in Bitrig, but we haven't optimized the experience around that.

Are you imagining you'd be editing the code with the software keyboard or a paired hardware keyboard?

I'm imagining quick prototyping (including on-device, offline execution) of small pieces of code (potentially growing into a small app) with the software keyboard, like in Pythonista or Pyto.

My workflow often goes like this: got an idea, let me quickly test it on the go, like while walking down the street, working on unrelated stuff or just chilling. Open up Pythonista, write some code, run it, tweak it, etc. If a piece of code becomes important enough, I copy it to the computer and continue working on it there.

I use both those for Python, very much enjoy them on iPhone in particular for little UI apps. Equivalent iPad workflow for me had been Swift Playground on iPad and Mac, although it seems stuck about a year ago at Swift 5.10 and iOS 17.5 SDK.

Much slower (minutes) with Xcode Cloud and a git repo, if I can git commit from my iPhone, I can edit app code and commit, watch Xcode Cloud Build see my commit, watch it build with debug logs, and when it works it shows up in TestFlight. Very much not offline, and minutes long loop.

Cool, that's really helpful context. We'll take a look at the code editing experience in those apps for inspiration.

Styling apps is an area we're excited to spend time exploring. Today in our system prompt we say "ALWAYS make the design Apple-like. Use clean typography and consistent padding/spacing." However, tbh it's not something we carefully tested.

For the most part, I think the look and feel of the apps benefits from SwiftUI baking Apple's design system into the defaults so heavily.

This is really cool of you to openly share the prompt - props for that.

Really cool product, as someone currently attempting to build a somewhat similar internal tool I have an understanding of some of the pain points involved.

Please don't allow yourselves to be bought out by Apple in the way Buddy Build were back in 2018 though! (and then shut down)

Heh... it definitely wasn't an overnight approval. However, Apple has relaxed the guidelines for developer tools compared to the early days of the App Store. If you look today there are Python IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and various other apps that execute user generated code. The key guideline to be mindful of is 2.5.2.