This is interesting - I’ve been messing around with AI generated games - I get about 50% out-of-the box ready to play intuitively now but it took a lot of refinement of the prompt to get there - I’ll tell my ai to have a go at this one and see what it produces (will credit op for the inspiration).
I would say this is an important part of the product-market-fit discovery process. Sure, your comment holds true for well established products with a loyal customer base, but for an earlier stage product this rapid iteration process is quite important, especially from an onboarding and ease-of-use perspective.
Opus 4.5 got released ~3 months ago - Claude Code started using it automatically (for me anyway) - I also tried iOS prior to that and had a similar experience to you
Very few - the only manual things I do are;
- clicking the distribute button to push the bundle to the App Store
- filling in the compliance survey and App Store listing content
- linking some components together e.g. for creating a VPN installer and tunnel i had to click some things in the Xcode UI
I automate as much as possible;
-“create 12 app icons for this in SVG and present them to me in a HTML page so I can choose one and then use that for the app icon and splash screen”
- “create a demo mode toggle in settings and populate the app with fake data and then open up simulators for the correct image dimensions for the App Store listing so I can crate screenshots”
- sometimes it tell me I have to other things like set up the entitlements to which is say “no - you do it and don’t forget to fill in the description that gets shown to the user so the feature actually works”
I knew very little about Swift or Xcode profile to this and TBH I still don’t know that much about it, but I’m experienced enough to know when I’m being fed something that doesn’t look or feel right programmatically or architecturally.
I second this article - I built twelve iOS/Mac apps in two weeks with Opus 4.5 - four of them are already in the App Store - I’m a Rails Engineer and never had the time to learn Swift but man does Opus 4.5 make that not even matter - it even handles entitlements, logo & splash screen generation, refactors to remove dead code, edge case assent and hardening, Multiplatform app design, and more - I’m yet to run into a use case it can’t handle for most general use cases - that said, I have found some common mistakes it makes (by common I mean almost every time); puts iOS line list line items in buttons making them blue when they should not be, doesn’t set defaults for new data structure variables which crashes the app when changing the data structure after the fact, design consistent after the first shot (minor things like white background instead of grey background like all the other screens already, etc) - the one thing that i know it cant do well (and no other model that I know of can do this well either) is ASTM bi-directional communications (we work with pathology analysers that use this 1995 frame-based communication standard), even when you load it up with the spec and supporting docs - I suspect this is due to a dirty of available codebases that tackle this problem due to its niche and generally proprietary nature…
Yeah - absolutely - every business has risks, but the point here that I’m trying to make is if those risks aren’t fully assessed, and you aren’t willing to risk going to jail based on the “hope” that humans behave exactly as expected and agreed then this is likely a business probably not worth pursuing - of course everyone has different risk tolerances - but there’s risk tolerance assessment and lack of experience in assessing risk - I don’t know the founder here but I believe it can only be helpful if different perspectives are presented.
To go a bit deeper, what you have here is a business where a somewhat unknown person is hired to any address that you type into a website and pay a marginal fee for - I’m struggling to see how you could keep people safe with this concept (not only the contractor, but also the customer).
It’s a fun, niche solution, but I’d posit when you start looking into the minimum financial requirements to operate this business in a way that “guarantees” everyone’s safety and insures against worst case scenarios, this is not a viable business even at the smallest scale.
I’m not sure how things are in America, but in Australia you can be made personally liable (both small and large businesses) for things that go wrong in your company, especially when someone gets injured e.g. https://www.ohsrep.org.au/prosecutions_sn_699_connect
IMHO it’s a corrupt line of thinking for a founder to not pay their employees. Even if they do raise the round (chances are they won’t) then you won’t want to work for these founders anyway as they’ve shown they are not capable of treating their employees fairly.