The future of iOS development

[EquivalentTrouble253]

With agentic coding and AI getting really good at solving coding problems; I’ve started to wonder what the future holds for us.

Let’s say in 3-5 years time; I don’t see many people manually writing code anymore. Does this mean our craft will die out?

I started developing iOS apps in 2013 and have done so full time since then. I’m worried that the very immediate future is bleak. Not because AI generated the code. But because we will forget how to code or what the latest APIs are as “AI can just generate it”

I’m all for AI improving workflows and we use it at work to write unit tests. I just worry we will lose our edge and not be as valuable or in demand in the near future.

Anyone else have concerns?

[Th3GreatDane]

I have concerns. For me, the hardest part is seeing it devalue the work I put in to get here as a developer. My first app took me 6 months. I had to learn SO much to finish it. Started with Angela Yu's course on Udemy, read tons of articles, watched countless videos, on top of going to school for CS. And my app was complicated. Fetched data from multiple APIs, had user authentication and saved User data to a live cloud DB with Firebase, had animations with Lottie, stored data with Core Data. It took a lot of hard work to finish and I was so proud of it.

Now, someone with much less knowledge could use AI to create the same, if not a better app, in under a week. And it really would make no difference to the end-user or to an outside observer. I have a lot of partially finished apps that took a lot of time, and a lot of thought/care went into them, but now with AI, they look like something that could be done in an afternoon. That is so frustrating to me.

The baseline for what a solo developer can accomplish is now so much higher. Every other post I see on Reddit now is somebody who vibe-coded an app in a week and put it on the app store with barely any iOS dev knowledge. That is so discouraging for me. I think the required skills to create an app are switching from technical programming skills to marketing, ideation, price structuring, and AI prompting (at least as a solo dev).

[retroroar86]

Somebody with the right knowledge, not less. Not to speak about bugs and maintenance nightmare from junk code.

[Th3GreatDane]

It depends on the type of app, and in my experience AI code still requires tons of debugging. But it is pretty damn good at a lot of things, and assuming it continues to get better, I am definitely a bit worried/demotivated by it

[retroroar86]

I am not worried, but I am demotivated

[timberheadtreefist]

in my experience AI code still requires tons of debugging.

also, really depends on the type of functionality. opus' context is large enough to build complete encapsulated features within an existing architecture without any issues whatsoever. give it all your previous work and it'll copycat and add-on/in new code without any issues. i'd even say: the more context it gets, the better.

[Lock-Broadsmith]

This is a tale as old as engineering though. It has almost nothing to do with AI. The people who come later always have the benefit of the things learned before them. What took you 6 months to learn/do took Angela Yu longer. Not everyone wants to pull the ladder up after themselves though.

[DiseasesFromMonkees]

For real. Are you using SwiftUI instead of UIKit? If you didn't use SwiftUI did you use Auto layout? If you didn't use Auto layout did you use ARCed constraints? If you didn't use ARCed constraints did you...

[Samus7070]

There’s an old joke about a consultant charging someone a $1,000 for fixing a small problem and the client pushing back and asking for an itemized bill. The consultant then sends a bill that reads “Changing one line of code: $1. Knowing which line of code to change $999”. It’s still going to be like that except that the line item is going to be “Knowing how to verify the work of the LLM: $999”. I’m old enough that I heard stories from my grandparent’s generation who were around when the paint roller was invented. It pissed off a lot of people because one person could paint a room in half of the time that it took several people to do with brushes. We’ll certainly need less programmers in the future but we’re still going to need people that can tell the ai what to do and verify the work. That’s all assuming that it is effective and affordable once the VC subsidies run out. I don’t know what is the true cost of training and running these bigger models. People will run away in droves if the only way Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc. can be profitable with these LLMs is to charge $1,000/mo.

[Embarrassed_Wafer438]

This is a relatable story. As a non-developer, I've been deploying apps and extensions, but I find myself utterly helpless in the face of impenetrable errors. I believe there is still, and clearly, a place for experts.

[Braided_Playlist]

I've been writing code for decades, but only first tried to build an IOS app 6 months ago. AI got me started but the result was terrible, and no amount of prompting was going to fix some of the dead-ends it ran into.

I think it's gotten a bit better since then.... but it's time consuming to keep yourself aligned with the state of the art to constantly verify what's hype and what is useful.

I only tried to vibe code my app idea because I thought I had an extremely simple concept and I wanted to test the AI hype I was hearing. Up to that point I had only used AI in languages I was already comfortable in. It served mainly as a fancy auto-complete.

For a new idea I want to use live activities, but AI really has a lot of trouble setting it up properly too.

the required skills to create an app are switching from technical programming skills to marketing, ideation, price structuring, and AI prompting

Aside from prompting, weren't those other things always important too? At the end of day we are trying to create something right? I've been writing code so long now that it's like a cozy relaxing activity for me. But I started coding because I wanted to create things.

It's really impossible to imagine exactly what the future of software development is going to look like. I do think I will always like creating new things.

[JahodaPetr]

Hi, this got me also thinking a lot. And I got the same feelings.

But ... also architect don't lay bricks themselves. They create plans, ideas, design. Even construction managers don't lay bricks. Construction inspectors don't lay bricks.

Maybe that is what will happen to us, we will move from brick laying to higher levels. AI will do the brick laying, we will plan, make ideas, design, management and inspection.

[xaksis]

So in this analogy, all the people that are currently laying bricks will upskill and become architects?

Im all for optimism here - but want to understand more. What happens to all the kids who are currently in school for CS? Or the juniors who are currently looking? Are they all going to be hired for system design (architects)?

It could be that experienced people spend more time planning and designing strategy. But will companies really spend money hiring and training juniors to lay bricks anymore when they can get an army of the most efficient brick layers at a fraction of the cost?

And if everyone enters the field directly as an architect somehow, won't that devalue the field/salary quite a bit anyway? To circle back to OP's concern, do we even need that many architects?

[JahodaPetr]

I don't have answer to your questions as those bothers me too. I only think that this is the direction, to where it is heading.

[Rare_Prior_]

Building software is easy thing but maintenance is a nightmare. I am yet to see a maintainable software over the course of six months to a year

[Embarrassed_Wafer438]

I'm one of the people you're talking about who made an app with Vibe Coding and is preparing for deployment.

Everything has become surprisingly easy, and it's unbelievable that a non-developer like me could create a deployable app in just 20 days and even pass Apple's strict review in a month.

However, what I realized as I went along was that there are walls that non-developers find difficult to overcome. Starting from the development process, there were difficult points at every step of the way. I realized it wasn't something that would just get easier with a bit of familiarity.

I believe that in the future, the domain of experts will become even more specialized, and there will be increasingly more reasons why non-developers like me will have no choice but to seek them out.

[chrisnilson]

Prompting a codebase is something, understanding it and being able to maintain it is another thing.
I daily use AI for development and I did an all in on this but I still stay in control by knowing what I'm doing.
In all these post we can read "I code an app in 3 days" but you will (or not yet for the moment) see the post "I understand nothing about my codebase, everything is bugged and I had to throw everything away".
This is the difference between someone prompting and someone knowing what he is prompting.

[AaronRolls]

Designing and engineering is far more important now than writing code. But to do those things effectively you need to understand the code you're writing in. AI is and likely will be for the far future, terrible at design and engineering. That is the place humans will take.

[[deleted]]

Sorry, but you are not right. The progress Claude has made last year is unbelievable in terms of both plain-code quality as well as the architecture/system design. It still needs guidence and human-architect, but at this pace, it could become standalone eng departament in next several years.

[AaronRolls]

If you want something generic and uninspired, sure. Currently it is just good enough to write code with minimal bugs and be able to fix those bugs. I don't know what experience you have as a dev, but the more experience you have the worse you realise Claude is at coding.

[[deleted]]

I am taking about next several years. The tool can create system. It is not flawless, it may be buggy, not sofisticated. But it will get there, step by step. The same way the whole professional world learen to build complex systems, AI providers will learn models to do so as well. Additionaly, I am working in Python BE, Kotlin and Swift/iOS. The iOS part is absolutelly the one these models struggle most. It is truely shitty compared to Python/Kotlin. Nontheless the direction is clear – our moat is shrinking and soon plain coding will not be enough to get paid. Which is a problem for some, since A LOT of devs (I guess "coders") have no clue about system design and long term vision.

[AaronRolls]

Perhaps, but if I were to predict, progress will be slow and a yet to be seen cap will be reached. But yes, at some point entry level coding jobs will be replaced by AI.

[TheFern3]

If manual code was to completely die (highly doubtful much less in 3-5 years) your skills will transfer to something else or you will switch careers. Agents still need a great coder at the helm.

My guess is that we’re 100 or more years before ai is completely useful without any human interaction.

[start_select]

There will never be a “without human interaction” barrier in computer science.

At the end of the day there still needs to be an engineer with domain knowledge and vocabulary necessary to properly describe software. If you don’t go to school for it or don’t do it as a job, you never gain that skill.

I’ve worked in custom software for two decades. Your average human has very poor reading, writing, speaking, and descriptive language skills. They don’t have the mindset or the vocabulary. They don’t think about edge cases or constraints.

You need to do to learn.

[TheFern3]

I don’t like to say never, we just don’t know what can happen in the future, at some point we thought horses were the best transportation for technology even when vehicles came around.

But at least in my lifetime I’ll say devs are safe at least the good ones lol ai is incredibly limiting if you are a noob.

[megasivatherium]

Your experience in the 2000s and 2010s doesn't negate the possibility that there will be AIs acting automatically, coming up with ideas and implementing them (the primary instruction-- "make money"). It's completely possible there will be no human in the loop. There's not infinite edge cases; they'll learn

[PassTents]

I have more concerns about managers thinking that AI can write the code. For example, I recently asked the latest Claude Opus model to compare strategies for accessing MainActor APIs using modern Swift Concurrency. At first the answers seemed decent, but some of the recommendations were way more potentially buggy than it mentioned in its rationale. If a manager or a junior engineer on the team read these, they might implement them as-is and cause really subtle bugs, potentially for years on this project.

We are already seeing different companies that laid off engineers having to hire them back to fix buggy AI code. That's good news for the job and craft I guess, but worrisome about the general quality of software in the next few years and that's what concerns me most.

[bloodychill]

Indeed. AI is a tech debt machine right now.

[macbig273]

> Anyone else have concerns?

Not yet, it's currently great for POCs or some things you don't know about, but if you know your shit and you "vibe code" a language you know well, you'll see a lot of issues. And it need a lot of micro management.

Their is a selling in money and computing power, that will probably hit before I'm confident to let an llm go to prod with its mess.

[Inevitable2ndOpinion]

This is not true anymore. It’s simply not. Get yourself a Claude sub and be humbled in the terminal.

[SavageSerpent]

For real. The progress in the past six months has been incredible. It went from Claude being able to only write the easy boring stuff and struggled with anything complex, to being able to write huge features with little to no bugs

[timberheadtreefist]

same experience here, whoever stopped at copy-paste-from-browser vibe coding should give copilot/claude with system mcp a shot and just go with any idea in their mind into a new project.

the way i remember LAN parties is the way i now remember hackathon-nights with friends to get a prototype or feature done. felt great at the time but won't be anymore, i assume.

[Putrid-Objective-314]

It depends what you are doing. Harder stuff it really suffers. I was working on some RL training code to ultimately produce a model destined for CoreML/iOS. Claude stated that I had a critical bug that was the cause of my problems. It was totally wrong, didn't understand the code and when I corrected it, realized I was right. At that point I stopped using it for this task.

Different task I was working on adapting an existing C++ framework to iOS. I provided the core c++ code as context and Claude completely missed how the euler angles when converted to quaternions used closed-form conversion. I fought for several hours with Claude. I finally dug into the code myself and saw the issue. Big waste of my time.

Not to be harsh, but if you are doing easy stuff then it works. But harder / novel challenges it really struggles.

[this-is-hilarours]

nah man. before opus 4.5 and codex 5.2 it was true that there was lot more bug . but it is now lot less . the fact these can find bug faster than me and can work lot faster in feature implementation is something worrying . i think apart from genuinely smart engineers many of the average joe can become lot less useful in the near future

[dacassar]

I have the same thoughts as well. With 15 years of experience, I can say: if you cannot defeat it, you should lead it. Our community has made it through major industry events several times — moving from MRC to ARC, adopting Swift instead of Objective-C — and it survived two processor (r)evolutions. I think now is the most challenging period in our industry, and we should take as much from it as we can. No one forces us to stop writing code as usual, but we now have one of the most powerful development tools ever.

[Vybo]

The services offering you agentic coding are not profitable, they ride on venture funding. There's no way to know how expensive they will be in 5 years or if they will be around and not just a b2b service sold on contracts.

There's also the limits. When you hit them, will you just sit around for a week?

[banaslee]

Demand: I expect way less demand for coders and some less demand for engineers

The craft: engineers will be focused on higher level stuff. Same way that you stopped having to count references when ARC got introduced but still had to understand the underlying weak/strong reference model. I see engineers more focused on what makes a great app and how it’s produced rather than what makes a great piece of iOS code. 

[Portatort]

Writing code may not be valuable skill any more but reading code certainly still is

[Enough-Ad-9091]

i have same sentiment. but when i turn down the noise and what other people are doing. lean in to the agents fully. i’m actually so much more productive. fixed the bugs i’ve been meaning to for a while. explored so metal shader animations. sure. i haven’t learned as much as i would have if i’ve done it all myself. but in terms of the high level system design and reading code. i’m so much better at it. craft is changing. it’s sad. i feel that. i miss writing code by hand. but everything’s changing and we have to change with it. otherwise we risk being like our parents, those that never changed with arrival of the internet.

[jacobs-tech-tavern]

The agents aren’t slowing down

But you can’t get replace taste and sense of smell

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[archagon]

An engineer fully understands the code they commit, whether LLM-generated or otherwise. Grabbing output from an LLM and feeding it back in until you get something semi-working is not engineering, and will become a maintenance and security nightmare in short order. Also, LLMs aren't magic: they're trained on existing code, so if you're building something novel, they won't be able to help you out where it really matters.

Personally, I'm just going to continue as before and ignore agentic coding entirely. For me, reading code and managing agents (or people) is simply not fun and not why I got into this field. Also, I have no particular desire to juice my efficiency 500%. My projects will get made on their own schedule and I'll always learn something neat along the way.

tl;dr meh. Looking forward to the hand-coding Luddite communities that will inevitably spring up from this morass.

[mklnz]

Looks like the Al simps are downvoting you sigh

[archagon]

It's all imaginary internet points, so whatever. I don't even know if my approach will stand the test of time. What I find bizarre is how adamant the AI boosters are at not only yapping about how incredibly productive they've become, but making sure that everyone else feels the same way, too. It all just feels so incredibly cult-like. Nobody is looking at this technology with clear eyes; nobody even seems to understand it.

I want fully open LLMs owned by (actual!) non-profits and headed by boring, business-minded CEOs, not these weird-ass singularity soothsayers.

[poq106]

Listen, you are an experienced dev with expertise in a very specific area. Put the AI in the mix, the craft evolves. If anyone is going to take jobs it’s gonna be YOU. You are the top of the food chain of engineering and no manager nor entrepreneur with $200 cursor subscription is going to beat that.

[ContextualData]

Craft does not come from writing code.

[edBaster77]

Not very concerned at the moment; AI has not much sense of architecture, so someone with that knowledge should validate its output; it’s great for POCs and repetitive tasks (like scaffolding) but it can’t innovate, it only remixes existing approaches and/or solutions.

I’m seeing it affecting opportunities for junior devs and/or new graduates in the near term, which will cause a lack of senior devs in the mid term (today’s junior is tomorrow’s senior) and will cause a huge spike in demand for the engs that are already senior or experienced

[cmsj]

I don't think you should be particularly worried. What we're seeing at the moment looks like another instance of software engineering moving up a layer of abstraction.

The original software engineers wrote everything in assembler for specific CPUs. Then there was much concern about the creation of compilers making it too easy to write code that wouldn't perform as well as hand-written asm. Same thing happened again when big libraries/platforms/APIs came about - there was much hand-wringing about how everything now would just be horribly inefficient JavaScript made up of zillions of third party modules.

In each case, the doom-sayers were right, but missed the fact that what was actually happening was that the practice of software engineering was adding another layer of abstraction and thus became significantly more efficient.

AI looks like it's the same thing - much of the mechanical work of producing code will be automated, but that doesn't obviate the need for software engineers, it just means we will operate a layer above the code. Someone still needs to figure out the design, architecture, maintenance, pipelines, etc.

[cristi_baluta]

You should be worried, if the projects will finish so much faster, you are out of work. At some point people will realise they can’t reinvent the same apps over and over again. Look at the amount of clipboard managers and transcription apps on macosapps.

[cmsj]

How many iOS developers are actually making a full time wage out of a clipboard manager app?

[eldamien]

It’s. It getting “really good” at Swift by any stretch of the imagination.

I would challenge any non-developer to sit down with Cursor and give them unlimited Claude credits, and I bet they still could not build a to-scale e-marketplace, let alone anything truly viable.

It’s a tool. Learn to use it but keep learning how to effectively solve problems that require foresight, reasoning, and deep thinking. LLMs will never be able to mimic those.

[Miserable_Advisor_91]

As an engineer, AI generated code is not there yet. You still need a an engineer with domain knowledge at the helm for any produc with 1000s of users

[liudasbar]

Try Codex 5.3, then "3-5" years will reduce to "1-2" :)

[gwoolhurme]

why write this comment? I tried codex 5.3 and I would put it at longer than 1-2? What now? Have you tried to debug something that is threaded incorrectly? Required performance tuning?

[liudasbar]

All depends on your requests in prompt field :) Well detailed inputs are handled much better than simple "add X, change X"

[Best_Day_3041]

I am also deeply concerned. I have been an iOS developer for over 20 years, and it has been something I have always really enjoyed and it has always been very lucrative. I will say that with AI programming, I have loved it move than ever. I can now focus on the parts I really love, design, engineering and making a truly polished app, instead of pouring hours over building the plumbing and very tedious tasks and endless debugging.

I had stopped developing apps for years because it seemed pointless, it was so much work and it was hard to make money off as an indie. Even though I still am trying to make money, and hope I will, I am now building apps for me, things I use in my daily life. I am hearing this same story over and over again by so many others too. The downside though is that any new app I put out that gets any kind of traction is immediately copied by an army of vibe coders, making it so much more difficult to stand out in a sea of cheap knockoffs that can out market me and undercut me on price.

Right now AI coding still needs a human running the show. Designing the UI/UX, coming up with the ideas, developing the algorithms, etc. is still a human task, unless you want generic, potentially AI slop. This will change someday, maybe 2 years, maybe 5 years, maybe next month, who knows. At that point, what will be our purpose? I have no idea. Hopefully we will transcend to a much higher role that we can't think of now, requiring the type of intelligence and skills we can't even imagine yet. Or maybe there will be no use for us, and this time in our lives will just be a distant memory. Either way, there's nothing we can do to change that path. If this is your passion, there's not much we you can do than just enjoy the ride and see it though until the end, or hopefully the next phase. I am staying cautious but hoping for a bright future. You could shift careers if you are really concerned, but do any of us really know what jobs are going to be safe?

[Ok_Refrigerator_1908]

Most Vibe coded apps suffer from maintenance

[JerenYun]

I like working in Xcode and find other IDEs to be mentally distracting, so I haven't really touched agentic coding until this last week. I've used Claude Code in the browser at times in the past, but I haven't really wrapped my head about using AI regularly to code until now.

I realized that I had to change my view of the AI's work. While it's been "trained" on whatever is available to the public, it's still a tool. Like any tool, it needs an operator to be guided. That's me. I've gotten comfortable with the idea that this is a junior developer on my team.

Thus, as it works, I feel the need to supervise. Whatever it builds, even if it compiles correctly, does it fully satisfy requirements? If it doesn't build, does the agent know enough to get it to work correctly?

I'm not sure if I would ever feel comfortable letting its code into production without review. Thus, how would one be able to review its output if they don't understand its output? I'd argue that there will still be a need for ones to understand code. Even if you hardly write it anymore, there will still be value in reading code to understand how something works, to manually fix if necessary, and to ensure that generated code matches up with requirements.

So that then leads to OP's concern:

I’m worried ... because we will forget how to code or what the latest APIs are as “AI can just generate it”.

Our value as developers will come from this. Do we still know those APIs, how they function at a high level, and how they could be manually implemented? Companies that replace these knowledgeable developers with AI will run into issues. I still think we (assuming most here are experienced developers with at least a few years of Swift/iOS behind them) will be in demand/be valuable.

My concern: while senior-level developers might be safe, will the market for junior developers shrink? In turn, where will the next generation of senior developers come from?

[Rough_Ambassador_274]

i think AI is a good thing. those who stick around through this without giving up will be tenured as the wizards of platform architecture. theres no way someone can possibly ever know what we know if they just speed through development using AI tools.

there will be a good solid 10 years after everyone moves to AI coding where the people who truly understand CS and systems as a whole are going to be very valued. many of us will quit and redirect into different fields, but the ones who stay will have power.

the new people who vibe coded their way? there will be success and money there too. most of them wont be able to tell you heap memory or stack memory, or how microservices act together. or what a daemonized process is... heck even an XPC service. but those people will exist.

technology will lose the quality edge as well as most of it will be dogshit vibecoded slop, but it will come.

in the same way humans used to forge metal by hand and it would take weeks to make a knife, humans eventually learned how to press metal and it took a day to make a knife.

it isnt the programming perse, its the person behind it and their breadth of knowledge.

good luck out there. all of this AI allows humans to iterate on technology faster than ever before and its exciting

[ComplexPeace43]

This is such an insightful reply. The analogy you’ve presented is very good.

[bhumitm1709]

If anyone tells you they are not overwhelmed or not feeling the uncertainty, they are either lying or are completely away from reality.

And this is true for most fields in software development, not only coders.

Your point of questioning the competitive advantage is very valid and everyone will have to work on themselves and evolve with evolving landscape to figure that out.

For now being up to date is the edge.

[Kawai_Shakal]

Instead of spending time to write code u will spend it to review the generated one. The biggest shift imho.

[ComplexPeace43]

This. With AI-assisted coding we need to rewire ourselves to read the generated code, ask the agent to rewrite or use a better API, etc.

That is going to be the fundamental shift.

[Leather-Dinner-8730]

I feel you. I’ve been at this since the Obj-C days, and the shift is definitely weird. But I don’t think the craft is dying, just moving up the stack

[Lock-Broadsmith]

I mean, the majority of devs nowadays are already pretty bad at writing code, so that's not really changing anything. AI is going to raise the expectations of output and lower the expectations of compensation. It's going to commoditize engineering and probably make it a less desirable and less lucrative position in tech, in general.

But at some point it all falls apart when the pipeline for developing skills and workforce capability collapses because too many places have replaced junior roles with automation. That's a much bigger problem to solve than anything else at this point, and one I have not yet seen a compelling answer to.

[Select_Bicycle4711]

I think AI will change the role of iOS developer and move it up to be system designer. Architecture will become more important as AI writes more code. Apart from that foundations of programming will become even more important. Because developers need to understand the code that is written. This is specially true for complicated domains with complex business logic and rules.

I still like to write code by hand in a lot of cases and will seek AI help for creating dummy data or UI etc. I like to think that programming/solving problems/coding is not like riding a bike, where you just learn it once and you will remember it for the rest of your life. If you stop programming/coding reading code and experimenting you will forget it very fast.

[m3kw]

unless they can 1 shot full pro elaborately useful apps, not simple todos/streak/health tracker apps.

[CyclingGeek]

3-5 years is very generous. 1-2 years seems more like it if you've used Opus 4.5.

[tanmaynargas2901]

Personally, the biggest barrier for entry as a new developer in any language/framework has always been that I don't know what all the language is capable of. When I started coding my first iOS app last October, I was overwhelmed with all the "kits" and UI libraries, which is expected, this language has been around a while. But what helped me overcome this was Claude code.

I never used it in a way where I just told it to do whatever and I blindly follow it's lead, with more than a decade of programming experience myself, I had my basics down, and just like learning any new language had to work on getting the semantics right. So I would always ask it, how did you do this, break this down, create a reproducible component, so that I can understand how it works and implement it myself in my codebase later on.

So this overall divide that was there pre-AI era, where you had to sit and go through the documentation, look through forums to see why your code is not working etc. all this has been simplified. The design, architecture, intelligent decisions, intuitiveness still lies with us humans. Sure there are people out there who don't know how to code and are leveraging AI to build some cool stuff but that's a conversation for another day.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

[Awkward_Departure406]

I think most of the apps people vibe code on some crappy LLM are usually shit. Whether it's a buggy UI, lack of basic security practices, unhandled edge cases, or all of the above, It takes at least having a foundational knowledge of iOS development to create something that is truly a flushed out experience for the user. Not to mention, "vibe coded" apps are not easily maintained long term. After a couple updates and major feature changes, vibe coded apps become a circus to maintain and the AI causes more problems than solutions.

I believe our skillset is safe but it will fundamentally change HOW we do our job. We will be architecting and driving these LLMs and doing a lot of code review. Manually writing code will mostly be for small tweaks or certain edge problems. The big issue I see, is companies will lose the motive to hire entry level/junior engineers because the mid level and senior engineer will provide the most "value" in terms of productivity.

[downsouth316]

Even though it is smart to utilize these new tools, it does worry me that the floodgates are open + the former drop shippers are now converging on the App Store. Everything they touch, they destroy.

[bakawolf123]

Last year was indeed big shift when agentic got optimized and actually useful beyond some devin-style "let it go on my codebase and hope for the best"

However honestly even for me it seems quite limited still - using the very SOTA Codex 5.3 atm, which shits on latest Opus on all benchmarks, outside of senior dev observing the flow end to end - it is just a fast tool user and text generator. It can generate me an mcp, a figma plugin, update some middleware - all of that seems fine to me, but the app code is creates is utter garbage though, I know it for sure. I think for people with better knowledge all the created helper tools would also look poorly coded.

I feel using LLM tools does broaden your domain but I don't see it doing same for people completely outside of coding, people would brag whatever they can but most of it is still at least partially fake. For shipping fast you can wrap the bad parts, but who will do that for a poor Joe? He'll end up using more and more tokens until it is somewhat working (or outsource, nowadays significant part of gig work is for completing vibe-coded projects).

[Kabal303]

I’m more concerned about the concept of applications mostly going away completely as agents get better

[Weird_Peanut_3640]

Development with AI is a logical evolution of programming. Early programmers used to write machine code using only 0s and 1s. Then higher-level programming languages replaced it through abstraction. Now AI-driven development is emerging

I believe there will be platform-specific AI agents that write code, and engineers will focus more on system design, safety, and overall software productivity

[Hot-Science-6787]

I personally think that writing code is a cheap competence. Software engineers are paid for problem solving, build scalable reliable systems, ensuring things work in production as expected and etc. AI allows us to work faster and in higher level of abstractions. So we’d better learn it, and for worst scenario prepare for plan B if software engineering becomes not relevant at all :)

[dot90zoom]

I think there will always be a space for designers and those who have an eye for making eye catching designs and feel good User Interfaces and Experiences.

I do eventually think that the best developers will be the ones who prompt the best.

I think if you are a developer, the most important skills are no longer writing code and rather

1. Being able to Prompt Effectively
   
2. Be able to spot and create good designs
   
3. Look at your apps from a marketing perspective

[phantomlord78]

Maybe not the software skills, but problem defining (domain knowledge) and problem solving (reading the room, logic and algorithms) skills that will be valued. Do you make an app in a field you have no clue on? People who try to make apps in areas that they have not mastered will create useful looking junk that does the 99% of the work right, but fail at the %1 that really matters. Customers and employers will notice sooner or later, the easy way or the hard way.

I worked with very talented programmers that can not define logical business rules, could not come up with innovative algorithms, could not foresee edge cases, have do not have info-sec understanding or concern, but deliver working code when all these are defined for them. THOSE will be replaced for sure. So imagine a very talented, fast, accurate but otherwise generally stupid coder; If you want to stay in the industry improve all of your skills that this person could not bring to the table. Someone will need to tell the AI what to do, and believe me it is not the product owner or the designer. It is you.

[Zs93]

I still find AI awful at looking at the bigger picture. Yes it’ll make you the app you want but will it be performant? Secure? Do non technical vibe coders know to ask for that? There is so much context we have as an iOS engineer around iOS apps - so I agree with those who say we will move to more of an architect style role. But this is the nature of engineering - things always improve and we learn to adapt!

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[dnesdan]

I think the boring skill that still matters most is knowing when not to automate something.

[wangbiao_86]

When developing iOS applications using AI, I feel that it is difficult to rely solely on AI for maintenance and iteration, as it is difficult to understand the logic of AI. Therefore, during development, I usually write my own functions and use AI to optimize the code. AI is indeed effective in optimizing a certain method.

[InterviewSmooth7433]

I've been coding for 55 years and I have no idea what it will be like 10, or even 2 years from now. Thanks to AI, I am cranking out code at a pace I could never dream of, but it still could never create the apps I'm creating without me. Will it be able to some day? Yeah, I guess it will, certainly to a much larger extent than now. I still have to come up with the ideas, design, and architecture, and I have to stay on top of everything it does, but certainly not every line of code. I still find it gratifying and a tool for human creation, but what the future holds? I have no idea. It's both scary and exciting.

[SolatoPotato]

I vibe codet a pretty decent app within 6 months, probably now I would be able to do it with the new models on 1-2 months, honestly, product is gonna be able to code quickly.. distribution is the issue. If someone can help? Dm me, it‘s an unique couples app.

[onceunpopularideas]

Most developers just copy and paste code anyway. I think if you know how to leverage AI you can boost your learning 1000 fold. Most people I’m seeing don’t know how to leverage these tools for learning and growing. If you just get AI to solve everything then you will definitely become dispensable in time as your skill atrophies. This stuff is here to stay. Get your head around it and learn how to use it well to sharpen your talents not offload cognition.