Vojtěch Rylko and Werner Jainek (2025):
The robustness of this work is ensured by a rigorous theoretical foundation, inspired by operational transformations and Git’s internals. After twelve years in production, Things Cloud has earned our users’ trust in its reliability. But despite the enduring strength of the architecture itself, the technology stack lagged behind.
[…]
Our legacy Things Cloud service was built on Python 2 and Google App Engine. While it was stable, it suffered from a growing list of limitations. In particular, slow response times impacted the user experience, high memory usage drove up infrastructure costs, and Python’s lack of static typing made every change risky. For our push notification system to be fast, we even had to develop a custom C-based service. As these issues accumulated and several deprecations loomed, we realized we needed a change.
A full rewrite is usually a last resort, but in our case, it was the only viable path for Things Cloud. We explored various programming languages including Java, Python 3, Go, and even C++. However, Swift – which was already a core part of our client apps – stood out for its potential and unique benefits. Swift promised excellent performance, predictable memory management through ARC, an expressive type system for reliability and maintainability, and seamless interoperability with C and C++.
[…]
Our Swift server codebase has around 30,000 lines of code. It produces a binary of 60 MB, and builds in ten minutes.
[…]
Compared to the legacy system, this setup has led to a more than threefold reduction in compute costs, while response times have shortened dramatically.
In contrast, OmniFocus puts all the logic in the client and can sync using any WebDAV server.
Werner Jainek (MacRumors):
The new cloud is already up and running – and you didn’t notice a thing. That was by design. From the outside, everything appears the same. But under the hood, everything changed: the infrastructure, the architecture, and the language it’s written in.
This post takes you behind the scenes: why we rebuilt Things Cloud, why we chose to write it in Swift, and how we transitioned without skipping a beat.
[…]
To ensure a smooth transition, we ran the new cloud in parallel with the old one. While the old Things Cloud continued syncing everyone’s to-dos, the new cloud quietly processed the same data using its own logic and infrastructure. Every edge case and every corner of the sync model was tested under real-world conditions – without anyone ever noticing.
Justin Bengtson:
What have been some of the pain points in using Swift on Server? What does the community think it needs to be improved to be more widely adopted in the industry? Any specific issues with deploying on Mac or Linux would be nice to know as well.
taylorswift:
yes, in general, i have found Swift’s “crash early and crash violently” philosophy to be problematic for server-side use cases, where availability is paramount and downtime is fatal.
to this day, Swift doesn’t have a good way to recover from precondition failures, so a single logic error in a many hundreds of thousands of lines codebase, triggered by a single unlucky visitor (or robot) has a nuclear-sized blast radius that takes down the service for everyone.
Simon Leeb:
I’ll take a crashing service any day of the week, if the alternative is a runtime with “let’s soldier on, it’ll be fine YOLO” vibes. I can image the post-mortem forum post would then be “I accidentally updated half a million user data records with unrecoverable garbage” instead of “things were patchy for a while”.
Konstantin:
Build times, compute and memory footprint during build are astronomical. Swift components are costing us 3x more than JVM/Kotlin components and 10x more than Rust/Go components to build. It’s really quite expensive to run Swift on the server.
[…]
Developing for the server on macOS is a huge pain in two main areas: 1) the overlapping types with iOS/macOS frameworks (e.g. Crypto) makes it impossible to know if what builds on macOS will build and even run on some Linux environment. Others have already mentioned the pain of FoundationEssentials, networking etc. 2) As a result of the previous, the ecosystem of Swift packages is full of libraries which although claiming support for server/linux targets, do not actually (correctly) support that.
[…]
DX around tooling has many papercuts (we see this when onboarding devs coming from more established server language ecosystems). One very prominent point is, well, IDE - Xcode is great for apps but positively hostile for server apps.
Previously:
Amazon S3 Amazon Web Services AWS Lambda Cloud Docker iOS iOS 18 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia Software Rewrite Syncing Things Vapor
Kyle Chayka (Hacker News):
What I’ve accrued the most of by far, though, are TextEdit files, from the bare-bones Mac app that just lets you type stuff into a blank window. Apple computers have come with text-editing software since the original Mac was released, in 1984; the current iteration of the program launched in the mid-nineties and has survived relatively unchanged. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. Those files are stored as RTFs (short for rich-text format), one step up from the most basic TXT file. TextEdit now functions as my to-do-list app, my e-mail drafting window, my personal calendar, and my stash of notes to self, which act like digital Post-its.
I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking.
This resonated with me even though I mostly use TextEdit on secondary Macs that don’t have all my apps installed.
Via Michael Steeber:
I almost always have an unsaved document open on my Mac that I use like a scratchpad. And I have it set to create plain text files by default.
Louie Mantia:
Some things may not require redesigning. We might have simply figured them out.
Jason Anthony Guy:
Other than that final font faux pas—TextEdit’s default font is Helvetica—it’s a wonderful ode to an underappreciated app and a beautiful bit of writing.
John Gruber (Mastodon):
I get the feeling that Chayka would be better served switching from TextEdit to Apple Notes for most of these things he’s creating. Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.
[…]
But a big pile of unorganized RTF files on your desktop — or a big pile of unsaved document windows that remain open, in perpetuity, in TextEdit — is no way to live. You can use TextEdit like that, it supports being used like that, but it wasn’t designed to be used like that.
Of course, I think EagleFiler offers the best of both worlds. You get the same delightful text engine as TextEdit, yet you skip the friction of creating and saving files. But there’s no opaque database or proprietary file format like with Apple Notes; the real RTF files are still there, organized in real folders, and you can double-click to edit them in TextEdit itself if desired.
Garrett Murray (Mastodon):
This exact scenario is what led me—22 years ago, in 2004!—to create xPad for macOS.
Jon Snader:
Since I write everything in Emacs, this never happens to me. Part of starting a new file is executing a find-file which specifies its name and file system location. Even then, I just specify it in the minibuffer; there’s no annoying open dialog to deal with.
[…]
As you all know, I solved the same problem with Journelly. I use it as my memo book and typically make about 10 entries per day. People think of Journelly as integrated with Emacs but it can also save its data in Markdown so it’s perfectly usable on any system and editor as long as you’re using an iPhone.
It’s amusing how 40 year old technology is still more convenient and easier to use than “modern” systems with dialog boxes for everything.
Marcin Wichary:
Notes are still evolving. The UI keeps changing. I’ve had a note shared by a friend hanging alongside my own notes for years, without me asking for it. I remember the moment when tags were introduced, and suddenly copy/paste from Slack started populating things in the sidebar. Then there was this scary asterisked dialog that slid so well into planned obsolescence worries that it felt like a self-own[…]
[…]
On top of that, the last version of Apple Notes on my macOS occasionally breaks copy/paste (!), which led to some writing loss on my part. (If you cut from one note intending to paste in another, and realize nothing was saved in the clipboard, you lost the text forever.)
Jeff Johnson:
“I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning”
Except TextKit 2 totally wrecked the TextEdit UI.
Rony Fadel:
Dang what a downgrade (macOS Tahoe)
Jeff Johnson:
I finally figured out a longstanding, annoying TextEdit bug:
FB21856749 Mouse pointer changes from I-beam to arrow when clicked on insertion point, thereby preventing text selection
This is especially problematic when you open a document in TextEdit, which places the insertion point at the beginning, and you want to select text from the beginning. It’s difficult to avoid clicking on the insertion point.
Wevah:
Oh wow. I wonder if it’s because the insertion point is now its own view instead of being drawn by the text view (iirc).
See also: Mac Power Users Talk.
Previously:
EagleFiler Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Notes Rich Text Format (RTF) TextEdit
Jason Snell (complete commentary):
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)
[…]
After a few years of relative stability, the Mac has now given back all the goodwill it earned from our panel with the release of Apple silicon Macs. The issue wasn’t on the hardware side: There was wide agreement that Apple is at the top of its Mac hardware game. But macOS 26 Tahoe was condemned as a disastrous OS release, due to its half-baked visual design that hurt the Mac’s usability.
[…]
It was a very good year for iPhone hardware, which helped drive this score up from last year. The iPhone 17 line-up earned a lot of praise, including the base iPhone 17, for adding a bunch of features previously seen only on pro iPhones. The iPhone 17 Pro got a lot of love, too, while the response to the iPhone Air was more polarizing. Of course, the new Liquid Glass design on iOS 26 also came in for a lot of criticism, though many panelists praised it. Generally, iOS is considered the place where Liquid Glass shines best, even if some panelists felt that was damning with the faintest of praise.
[…]
A lot of praise was for iPadOS 26’s new windowing system, in which Apple seems to have figured out how to balance the iPad with a desire among some users for Mac-style window management. Some panelists who said they had drifted away from the iPad reported coming back into its gravitational pull. But as always, some skepticism remains about the iPad’s very reason for being.
Here are my responses:
Mac: 3 The M4 MacBook Pro with nanotexture display is one of my favorite Macs ever. The M4 MacBook Air was a great update, with more RAM and a lower price. The Mac Studio finally got an update, though the M3 Ultra chip is now two generations behind the M5 in the baby MacBook Pro released the same year. Nothing seems to be happening with iMac or Mac Pro. Overall, I’m down on macOS Tahoe due to the Liquid Glass design and large number of bugs. I do like that AutoFill can now work in third-party browsers. The new Spotlight seems like a big improvement, though I continue to prefer LaunchBar.
iPhone: 2 Processor, battery, camera improvements, and Ceramic Shield 2 in iPhone 17 (and 17 Pro) are nice, but I just find it hard to get excited about iPhone these days. The camera improvement I want to see, reverting to a deeper depth of field, will probably never happen. As with the Mac, iPhone is let down by the new software. I guess I like the new Camera app, and I like CarPlay widgets (though they need more font controls), but most of the other changes that I notice day-to-day are either neutral or regressions. Liquid Glass is maddening. Apple also set a bad precedent in preventing newer iPhones from updating to iOS 18.7.3, thus forcing them to update to iOS 26 to get security updates.
iPad: 4 Putting Liquid Glass aside—which is admittedly hard to do—iPadOS 26 is the biggest improvement in a long time. Multitasking works much better now. I still do not find it a very compelling platform, though. More than 99% of what I do is better on my Mac, my iPhone, or my Kindle. But if you like iPad, this was a good year.
Wearables: 3, Apple Watch: 4, Vision Pro: 1 Live Translation seems magical, though I’ve not used it myself yet. I’m concerned that AirPods Pro 3 seems to have issues with fit and static. I really like the Apple Watch SE 3. Vision Pro made few visible advancements this year and seems like it needs to be rethought or cancelled.
Home: 2 My HomePod continues to not work well for Siri or music. The smart outlet that I installed last year no longer works reliably. The Home app is still frustrating.
Apple TV: 3 It continues to work OK, but I don’t think any of the changes this year really improved my experience. I’m still not very happy with the software or the remote.
Services: 2 iMessage and Siri still work poorly for me. Apple Pay and the rest of iCloud are OK, with most apps that sync having occasional hiccups. The other services don’t interest me except in that their existence seems to be warping Apple’s product design decisions.
Hardware Reliability: 5 My family’s hardware has been solid this year (not counting the ever-present USB problems), and I don’t recall any major issues reported elsewhere. I remain a bit on edge because if a Mac’s SSD fails, the Mac can no longer even be used with external storage, and my experience with AppleCare has not been great.
OS Quality: 1, Apple Apps: 2 Most of the old bugs are still there, and the new OS releases brought new ones. Will this ever get better? Apple just seems lost. This year, I want to highlight how unreliable Screen Time is. I also experienced new issues where the “d” key sometimes doesn’t work on my Mac (with any keyboard) and my Apple Watch wouldn’t charge with third-party chargers. Nearly all of Apple’s Mac apps feel like they need attention, but I don’t really wish for that because recent revisions—like the Contacts app in Tahoe—tend to be regressions. I keep being tempted to switch away from Safari—the reliability, performance, and compatibility are subpar—but am sticking with it for now because I prefer its user interface.
Developer Relations: 2 The same old issues with the App Store, documentation, the schedule, and bug reporting. Apple needs a turnaround. Swift has not taken over the world. It continues to get new features without really feeling mature. Swift Concurrency is now officially approachable, but the complexity remains, and Apple has not convinced the community that this approach is actually an improvement. Flagship frameworks like SwiftUI and SwiftData continue to disappoint. On the plus side, there is finally a roadmap for improving the type checker.
Apple’s Impact in the World: No vote We tend to focus on hardware and software, and sometimes Apple’s interactions with various governments, but its customer account policies are an increasingly important area. These days, much of our devices’ functionality relies on services tied to your Apple Account. The account holds your purchases, your data (cloud storage and backups), and it’s the key to even being able to use certain features. It’s incredibly important, yet as we saw this year with the story of Paris Buttfield-Addison, your account can be taken away through no fault of your own and with no recourse save from running to the press. This is completely unacceptable. Apple should revise its procedures so that this sort of thing can never happen again, and it should audit its software to make sure that as much of it as possible does not require an account. One particular area of concern is passkeys. Years after their introduction, Apple finally shipped credential exchange, but it turns out that users still don’t have control over their data. You can’t export your passkeys for offline storage and later reimport into the Passwords app. Even if you have a full backup of your Mac, you can’t restore it and access your passkeys unless you have access to your Apple Account. If your Apple Account is working, your data is stored in iCloud, but it’s not really backed up because you can’t access historical versions. A sync bug will just wipe it out everywhere. If, as Apple says, passkeys are the future, they need to be implemented in a way that serves and protects users, rather than locking their data into a cloud of questionable reliability and which they could lose access to at any moment simply for trying to redeem a gift card.
• • •
Adam Engst:
For the fourth year in a row, Hardware Reliability topped the list, followed by the iPhone, iPad, and Services categories. On the other end of the spectrum, the Vision Pro and Developer Relations continued to dwell at the bottom[…]
[…]
Perhaps most troubling is that of the 14 categories, scores dropped in 11. Apple’s Impact on the World category suffered the largest decline, falling a full point to an F grade—a precipitous drop driven by Tim Cook’s obsequious relationship with the Trump administration. The controversial Liquid Glass design in macOS 26 Tahoe also drew heavy criticism, dragging the Mac’s score down by 0.7 points despite uniform praise for the hardware. The main bright spots were the iPhone (up 0.2 points thanks to the well-received iPhone 17 lineup) and iPad (up 0.2 points due to iPadOS 26’s new windowing system).
[…]
The panelists’ commentary was especially pointed this year. John Siracusa called Tahoe “the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac,” while John Gruber said, “There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI that is better than its predecessor.”
Nick Heer:
I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill. There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.
[…]
What I expect out of the software I use is a level of quality I simply do not see. I do not think I have a very high bar. The bugs in the big paragraph above are not preferences or odd use cases. They are problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps. I do not have unreasonable expectations for how things should work, only that they ought to work as described and marketed. But complaints of this sort have echoed for over a decade and it seems to me that many core issues remain unaddressed.
See also:
Previously:
App Store Apple Apple ID Apple Password Manager Apple Services Apple Software Quality Apple Watch Design Documentation iCloud Keychain iOS iOS 26 iOS Multitasking iOS Widgets iPad iPadOS iPadOS 26 iPhone iPhone Air Liquid Glass Mac Mac App Store macOS Tahoe 26 Passkeys tvOS tvOS 26 visionOS visionOS 26 watchOS watchOS 26
Juli Clover (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW):
According to Apple’s release notes, macOS Tahoe 26.3 focuses on bug fixes and security updates rather than new features, so it is a smaller update than some of the other releases we’ve had.
In the next couple of weeks, Apple will begin testing macOS Tahoe 26.4, an update that is expected to be much more feature packed.
Mr. Macintosh (post):
Apple’s macOS engineers: I know you’re working incredibly hard to make Tahoe better. The long hours spent troubleshooting bugs and fixing interface issues… all that effort, only for it to be trivialized by this nonsense.
[…]
Just take a look at the Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro patch notes. HUNDREDS OF MINOR FIXES LISTED!
How is it possible that an entire OPERATING SYSTEM does not have a single listed bug fix?
Matt Henderson:
Apple just keep getting better and better.
Howard Oakley:
What Apple doesn’t reveal is that it has improved, if not fixed, the shortcomings in Accessibility’s Reduced Transparency setting. When that’s enabled, at least some of the visual mess resulting from Liquid Glass, for example in the Search box in System Settings, is now cleaned up, as the sidebar header is now opaque.
Adam Engst:
Previously, some awkward aspects of Liquid Glass transparency persisted even after the user enabled Reduce Transparency, as shown in the Finder sidebar header and the System Settings Search field.
[…]
Two other Liquid Glass-related pecadillos fared less well. First, although Apple fixed a macOS 26.2 problem that caused the column divider handles to be overwritten by scroll bars (first screenshot below), if you hide both the path bar and status bar, an unseemly gap appears between the scroll bar and the handles (fourth screenshot below). Additionally, while toggling the path and status bars, I managed to get the filenames to overwrite the status bar (third screenshot below). Worse, all of these were taken with Reduce Transparency on, so why are filenames ever visible under the scroll bar?
Mario Guzmán:
Saddens me that even in 26.3 RC for #macOSTahoe, toolbars are still very much visually broken in full screen. :(
Jeff Johnson:
I couldn’t in good conscience sell ChangeTheHeaders to new customers when it was likely that the Safari extension wouldn’t work as advertised. The good news is that in my testing, Safari version 26.3, released yesterday by Apple, appears to have fixed the bugs. Thus, I’ve now returned ChangeTheHeaders to the App Store!
Steve Troughton-Smith:
There has been effectively zero progress on any of my critical showstopping UI-level blocker framework bugs since i/macOS 26.1. It really feels like we’re not going to see any progress again until WWDC and the next OS release. I have several apps I just haven’t been able to ship with Liquid Glass updates as a result.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-19): Nick Heer:
In apps like Messages and Preview, the toolbar finally has a solid background when Reduce Transparency is turned on instead of the translucent gradient previously. The toolbar itself and the buttons within it remain ill-defined, however, unless you also turn on Increase Contrast, which Apple clearly does not want you to do because it makes the system look ridiculous. Also, when Reduce Transparency is turned on, Siri looks like this[…]
Rui Carmo:
My desktop (a Mac Mini M2 Pro) has been crashing repeatedly since the update, and the symptom is always the same: it suddenly becomes sluggish (the mouse cursor slows down, then freezes completely), and then after a minute both my displays flash purple and then go black as the machine reboots.
For a machine that used to be on 24/7 with zero issues, this is a definite regression.
VaibhavMD:
I finished my work noted down the temps and started update finished update and closed the lid and let the os get stable. Next day I started working again with same softwares and to my surprise temps were way low compared to previous most of the time close to 55c and with really heavy load 70c to 80c sometimes it was going above 90c but never saw it cross 100c under full load. So for me it was big improvement after updating to Mac OS 26.3.
Ultragamer2004:
I recommend upgrading, 26.3 RC performance is pretty good on my base M2 air.
Update (2026-02-20): Marco Arment:
Another comically basic bug in Tahoe’s TV.app: if you remove a download from this menu, you cannot remove any other downloads from this screen (because the menu item won’t appear in their context menus!) until you navigate to a different section, then back to Downloaded.
I really have to wonder if anyone at Apple uses this app…
Accessibility ChangeTheHeaders Design Liquid Glass Mac macOS Release macOS Tahoe 26 Passwords TV.app
Agen Schmitz (MacRumors, Reddit):
Goodbye iWork, hello Apple Creator Studio. Apple has released version 15.1 of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers with a bevy of new features, as long as you pony up for the Apple Creator Studio subscription[…]
[…]
$129.99 annual Apple Creator Studio subscription; Keynote, 906.7 MB, release notes; Numbers, 722.3 MB, release notes; Pages, 859.6 MB, release notes; macOS 15.6+
Agen Schmitz:
Final Cut Pro, $299.99 new, 7.39 GB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Compressor, $49.99 new, 253.2 MB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Motion, $49.99 new, 3.94 GB, release notes, macOS 15.6+
Andrew Cunningham:
In lieu of running through each of these apps’ new features one by one, we’ve gathered answers to some questions about how the new subscriptions will work and how they’ll compare to the standalone versions of the apps.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
While Apple’s iWork apps all have a free mode, all the pro apps (including Pixelmator) have a splash screen to force you to subscribe at launch, with no way to play around without agreeing to the 3 month subscription trial. No real surprises there.
Geoff Duncan:
I’m sure I’ll have something pithy to say about a word processor needing a whole top-level menu item called “Privacy & Analytics” once I’m done picking my jaw up off the floor and then fuming.
“Share Analytics Data” is enabled by default. Because of course it is.
Jason Snell:
I dislike Apple’s choice to roll its “iWork” suite of apps into this bundle, not just because it turns a set of free products into freemium products with upsell, but because there are plenty of users of Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Freeform who do not need the powerful features of Final Cut, Logic, and Pixelmator.
With that said, the new features in the three classic iWork apps are all pretty impressive. (Apple says Freeform will gain suite integration at a later time.) All three apps get access to Content Hub, a media library full of photos and illustrations that can be integrated into projects for all three apps. There are also a bunch of new “premium” templates that add more options for people who don’t want to create that flyer or presentation all by themselves.
I like the Content Hub, which is accessible from the toolbar and is searchable and filterable by media type. I was able to very quickly pick out a background image for a slide and an illustration to use on a birthday card, for example. I pay an annual subscription for access to a limited number of stock media images from a library; it’s very nice that Apple is rolling this library into the Creator Studio subscription.
[…]
I’m a little less excited about the templates, which feel “premium” more in the sense that they’re not available to the people who aren’t paying. They didn’t really feel that much more creator-focused than any other Keynote or Pages template would. Shouldn’t Apple be making an effort to make nicer templates for all users of those apps? Does the introduction of premium templates mean that Apple’s no longer motivated to create new templates for everyone else? The whole thing just hits me wrong.
Benjamin Mayo:
The Creator Hub image library is really laggy to scroll around. Feels like classic SwiftUI on AppKit performance issues.
John Voorhees:
However, what’s most exciting to me is the fact that Apple is clearly repositioning these apps to appeal to a broader cross-section of creatives. Apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are no longer just for Hollywood and music studios. By filling out the iPad lineup and adding Pixelmator Pro along with enhanced versions of their productivity apps, Apple has taken the first steps toward realigning its apps with what it means to be a creative professional in 2026.
[…]
I’ve played around with the beta versions of Final Cut Pro for both Mac and iPad, and the new features work as advertised with the exception of Transcript and Visual Search, which I couldn’t get to work on the Mac. As is the case with a lot of the Creator Studio apps, my Final Cut Pro needs are pretty simple. Background export and full external monitor support on the iPad are the two features I find most compelling, but there’s a lot to be said for Transcript and Visual Search, both for editors on longer-form content and possibly for creating chapter markers for YouTube.
[…]
The lack of a podcast editing app in Creator Studio feels like a gaping hole. Podcasting straddles the audio and video worlds in a way that can be handled by a combination of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, but practically, a simpler app that could handle standard audio and video podcast formats would be better and would serve a large segment of the audience Apple appears to be trying to reach with Creator Studio. The fact that such an app doesn’t exist yet, despite Apple’s prominence in podcasting, is surprising, but Creator Studio’s focus on a broader swath of the creative community makes me optimistic that we might see a podcasting solution someday.
Mark Ellis:
What problem is Creator Studio addressing for creators, I asked?
John and Will noted that modern creators are no longer focused on just one skill. Musicians are often also video editors, and anyone running a creator business has to be as comfortable managing finances as they are cutting together an Instagram Reel.
By bundling together production apps like Final Cut Pro and productivity apps such as Numbers, Apple is hoping that modern creators will view Creator Studio as affordable access to high-end tools.
William Gallagher:
In AppleInsider testing, Apple Creator Studio’s Final Cut Pro for iPad is proving buggy, and if you use the default settings, your work can even be completely lost.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
For some reason I’m really taken by Pixelmator Pro’s new-document/template window, especially how it shows a preview of the clipboard. Maybe it’s the years of the travesty of Photoshop’s new file window and all of its terrible, slow variations, but seeing this all done natively makes me feel warm inside. This is a nice bit of UI
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Something I outright hate about Apple’s new Pixelmator Pro is that it saves changes automatically to disk. There’s no experimentation, no temporary workspace, it just goes right to iCloud.
That’s bad enough for something like TextEdit, but when you’re talking about a pro image editor working with potentially multi-gigabyte files, that is so incredibly irritating.
You can disable this behavior on macOS, but not on iPadOS, which I think is an existential mistake. I really hope they fix that.
Mario Guzmán:
Comparing the toolbars between Pages 15 (15.1?) and Pages 14:
Why is this a unified toolbar? You can barely see any of the title. Sure, you can expand the window but sometimes you just don’t have the space. The fat toolbar items are just so space inefficient.
Oh and it gets worse if you show the labels (as the default used to be).
Apps just tend to get more and more user hostile and I'm really trying to understand why?
Geoff Duncan:
Every single update to Logic Pro breaks fundamental interface behavior I use on every project. Sometimes its how panes open and close. Sometimes it’s how adjusting region edges changes edges you aren’t adjusting (and can permanently lose audio). It literally is like they have zero QA/testing on this stuff.
With Logic Pro 12, now it’s how it sets default scroll bar placement on the region editor EVERY SINGLE TIME. It’s either slammed to the very top of the scrollbar, or slammed to the very bottom.
Joe Rossignol:
Following the launch of Apple Creator Studio this week, Apple has quietly stopped selling its “Pro Apps Bundle for Education” separately, but it remains available with the purchase of a Mac on Apple’s Education Store on the web.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-19): YellowBathroomTiles:
Logic pro 12 looks nice and that’s about all.
It crashes my session all the time, it’s laggy, it mute and unmute the whole session for some reason, it won’t load plugins correctly etc.
Conclusion: Logic Pro 12 won’t serve my needs in any professional way.
I reverted back to 11.2.2 and it’s amazing, it, actually feels like the upgrade at this point.
Meek Geek:
Ads pushing Pages, Numbers and Keynote users to subscribe to Creator Studio appear right in the sidebar all the time, while users are trying to get work done. Hopefully these gross ones stay buried.
Update (2026-02-20): Juli Clover:
With the launch of the Creator Studio subscription app offering, Apple may be phasing out the iWork branding that it has used since 2005 for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.
Apple today removed the iWork section on its website, and the URL now redirects to a more generic “apps” page that features Creator Studio, Apple Arcade, Apple Invites, Image Playground, and other Apple apps.
Apple Creator Studio Apple Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Bug Datacide Final Cut Pro X Freeform iOS iOS 26 iPadOS iPadOS 26 iWork Keynote Liquid Glass Logic Pro X Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Numbers.app Pages.app Pixelmator Privacy
Colin Cornaby (Mastodon):
Certain tasks have worked well for me. These tasks tend to fit the LLM model well.
[…]
It’s probably not surprising that there is a relationship between the sunk cost fallacy and gambling. Gamblers get a huge dopamine rush when they win. Sunk cost fallacy feeds that. No matter how much they’ve lost it will be worth it because the next hand will be the big winner.
I’m kind of worried these tools are doing the same thing to developers. It’s easy to go “just one more prompt…”
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen places these tools excel. But I’m also seeing patterns where developers don’t know when to put them down.
[…]
As for my data structures issue? Claude Code made me realize that maybe I’ve been stalling because I need to plan better. So I closed Claude Code, opened up OmniGraffle, and started sketching some UML. Because it’s probably faster that way.
Daniel Jalkut:
There’s a lot of talk about LLMs making programmers lazy and uneducated, but I’m learning more than ever thanks to the way LLMs help me to drill into completely unknown areas with such speed. Always wary, but learning with almost every response.
Rosyna Keller:
Claude is sooo much better at SwiftData and common pitfalls than ChatGTP is that it’s actually embarrassing that Apple chose ChatGPT for Xcode Code Intelligence.
ChatGPT constantly and consistently hallucinates methods that don’t exist, repeatedly said features that actually existed didn’t exist (for example, FileManager’s trashItem() does work on iOS so long as your app has the correct plist settings! (Was added in iOS 11).
John Siracusa:
I’ve actually found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be the best at the SwiftUI and AppKit questions I’m asking. They’re all master fabricators of incorrect information and made-up APIs, but I still find their flailing helpful in getting me to try new things and learning new things to search for in the docs.
Collin Donnell:
My feeling is that if you account for the amount of times LLMs lead you down the wrong path coding and waste your time, and how much faster you’ll be in the future if you take the time to truly learn a new skill the first time, it’s pretty much a wash.
Peter Steinberger:
This is really good advice.
The code I get from LLMs is directly related how sharp or sloppy I prompt and how well I prime the context.
Dare Obasanjo:
While debating whether AI can replace software developers or not is somewhat absurd, it’s hard to argue against the significant productivity boosts.
A friend shared with me how after a performance regression following a release, they asked AI to review all of the recent diffs for the culprit. It flagged a few suspicious ones and on review one of them was the cause.
I imagine this is happening in every industry which is why Azure/AWS/GCP have more demand for AI than they can handle.
René Fouquet:
I shit a lot on LLMs. They can be as stupid as a slice of bread and a huge waste of time when reading the documentation would suffice. That being said, I used ChatGPT o3 on the weekend to set up my new Linux server with a ZFS raid, Portainer and 20 or so containers and it was an enormous time saver for me. Just reading the documentation alone it would probably taken a week or so to get to the same result. There were some frustrating moments, but overall it was very useful.
Sean Michael Kerner (Slashdot):
While enterprise AI adoption accelerates, new data from Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey exposes a critical blind spot: the mounting technical debt created by AI tools that generate “almost right” solutions, potentially undermining the productivity gains they promise to deliver.
Orta Therox:
Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate.
Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful.
I believe with Claude Code, we are at the “introduction of photography” period of programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t have the same appeal anymore when a single concept can just appear and you shape it into the thing you want with your code review and editing skills.
Craig Hockenberry:
When I was fooling around with NSSound.beep(), the AI code completion suggested a duration: parameter - JUST LIKE INSIDE MACINTOSH.
Colton Voege (Hacker News):
Despite claims that AI today is improving at a fever pitch, it felt largely the same as before. It’s good at writing boilerplate, especially in Javascript, and particularly in React. It’s not good at keeping up with the standards and utilities of your codebase. It tends to struggle with languages like Terraform. It still hallucinates libraries leading to significant security vulnerabilities.
AIs still struggle to absorb the context of a larger codebase, even with a great prompt and CLAUDE.md file. If you use a library that isn’t StackOverflow’s favorite it will butcher it even after an agentic lookup of the documentation. Agents occasionally do something neat like fix the tests they broke. Often they just waste time and tokens, going back and forth with themselves not seeming to gain any deeper knowledge each time they fail. Thus, AI’s best use case for me remains writing one-off scripts. Especially when I have no interest in learning deeper fundamentals for a single script, like when writing a custom ESLint rule.
Rui Carmo:
It’s a sober reminder that the hype around “10x engineers” and all the vibe coding mania is more about clever marketing than actual productivity, and that keeping our processes deliberate isn’t a bad thing after all.
TreeTopologyTroubado (via Dare Obasanjo):
I’ve seen a lot of flak coming from folks who don’t believe AI assisted coding can be used for production code. This is simply not true.
For some context, I’m an AI SWE with a bit over a decade of experience, half of which has been at FAANG or similar companies.
[…]
Anyhow, here’s how we’re starting to use AI for prod code.
[…]
Overall, we’re seeing a ~30% increase in speed from the feature proposal to when it hits prod. This is huge for us.
Alistair Barr:
In an unambiguous message to the global developer community, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke warned that software engineers should either embrace AI or leave the profession.
Martin Fowler:
My former colleague Rebecca Parsons, has been saying for a long time that hallucinations aren’t a bug of LLMs, they are a feature. Indeed they are the feature. All an LLM does is produce hallucinations, it’s just that we find some of them useful.
One of the consequences of this is that we should always consider asking the LLM the same question more than once, perhaps with some variation in the wording. Then we can compare answers, indeed perhaps ask the LLM to compare answers for us. The difference in the answers can be as useful as the answers themselves.
[…]
Other forms of engineering have to take into account the variability of the world. A structural engineer builds in tolerance for all the factors she can’t measure. (I remember being told early in my career that the unique characteristic of digital electronics was that there was no concept of tolerances.) Process engineers consider that humans are executing tasks, and will sometimes be forgetful or careless. Software Engineering is unusual in that it works with deterministic machines. Maybe LLMs mark the point where we join our engineering peers in a world on non-determinism.
Stephen Robles:
But after just a few hours vibe coding, I had a working app. A few days later, it even got through App Store approval. You can watch the whole saga here[…]
[…]
But that wasn’t enough. I figured if this was possible, maybe I can build a more complex app. An app I would be proud to share and use daily. I was going to build a podcast app.
[…]
I’m sure in the hands of a skilled developer, these tools can save time, take care of menial bugs, and maybe even provide inspiration. But in the hands of someone with zero coding knowledge, they may be able to build a single-function coffee finder app, but they certainly can’t build a good podcast app.
Russell Ivanovic:
You’re not alone. I’m an experienced developer (in fact I helped create Pocket Casts) and I think what you found is universal. None of the AIs match the hype. None of them are capable of building a complete app. They are all hype and no substance.
On a more positive note: AI is very good at helping you learn things. I use it almost every day to ask questions. I never get it to code my apps. What if instead of your current approach you use it to slowly learn to code?
Jacob Bartlett:
On a good day, I’ll ship a week’s worth of product in under a day with Claude Code. On a bad day, I’ll accidentally let my brain switch off, waste the whole day looping pls fix, and start from scratch the next day, coding manually.
Can Elma (Hacker News):
The early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code. At least that’s what I kept seeing. But now, partly because AI hasn’t quite lived up to the hype, it looks like what companies actually need is not junior + AI, but senior + AI.
[…]
So instead of democratizing coding, AI right now has mostly concentrated power in the hands of experts. Expectations did not quite match reality. We will see what happens next. I am optimistic about AI’s future, but in the short run we should probably reset our expectations before they warp any further.
Matt Ronge:
We used to brainstorm crazy features and discuss how fun they’d be to build, but as a small team, we never had the time.
Now, with AI, we can create many of these ideas. It’s amazing how much it’s boosted our appetite for building. It’s SOO much fun.
Chris Hannah:
However, the use-case that I really enjoy is when it can speed-run boring tasks for me.
[…]
I’m sure I could have written this script myself, but I didn’t want to. This is the sort of task that I put off for weeks, and maybe never get around to doing it. So being able to get AI to do this for me, makes my life much easier.
Brian Webster:
Haha, Claude Code just discovered a typo in one of my database table names that’s been there for a couple years (instead of “reportMetadata” it’s “reportMedatata”). I can’t fix it because it would break backward compatibility, but at least I can put a comment there in case I come across it again in another couple years. 😅
Simon Højberg (Hacker News):
Presently (though this changes constantly), the court of vibe fanatics would have us write specifications in Markdown instead of code. Gone is the deep engagement and the depth of craft we are so fluent in: time spent in the corners of codebases, solving puzzles, and uncovering well-kept secrets. Instead, we are to embrace scattered cognition and context switching between a swarm of Agents that are doing our thinking for us. Creative puzzle-solving is left to the machines, and we become mere operators disassociated from our craft.
Some—more than I imagined—seem to welcome this change, this new identity: “Specification Engineering.” Excited to be an operator and cosplaying as Steve Jobs to “Play the Orchestra”. One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding. Did they confuse Woz with Jobs?
[…]
Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who clearly only skimmed their “own” code—is taking no responsibility, going “whoopsie, Claude wrote that. Silly AI, ha-ha.”
Simon Wolf:
What sort of applications are people writing where AI is saving them hours and hours of hand-writing boilerplate code? This is a genuine question because, apart from in perhaps the very early stages of a new application, I very rarely find myself doing this.
I’m starting to file it away with people who think that the speed they can type at is their biggest development bottleneck. Or am I just ponderously slow and I think about my code too much so that typing is the least of my worries?
Brian Webster:
I’ve found it’s good for chugging out code that is following pretty well established patterns, but more complex than boilerplate.
To give one recent example, I had to get a new bit of info from a few levels down in my controller hierarchy up to the top-ish level of the app. This required adding similar delegate methods in a whole bunch of places and inserting all the “upward” calls. This is annoying as hell to do by hand, but an LLM does very well at this, and quickly.
Brian Webster:
One thing I find myself doing more as a result of using AI coding tools is leaving more comments in my code as a way of explaining code’s purpose to the agent when it comes across a particular piece of code. But of course this benefits future-me too, so it seems like a win-win!
Gus Mueller:
Someone reported a bug in Retrobatch’s dither node when a gray profile image was passed along - and yep there it was. Had to rewrite the function that did it because I’m a dummy. But then I was like … hey ChatGPT make me a CMYK version of this AND IT DID. And it noticed a memory leak in my implementation and said so in a comment and I’m a dummy.
Tobias Lins:
I’m slowly giving up on coding agents for certain things.
- Code quality overall mostly bad
- It loves to do inline
await import
- It often duplicates code that already exists
Hwee-Boon Yar:
I keep my notes and TODO list in a wip.md file and it’s getting big. I’m trying this:
- Convert it to PDF
- Cross out and star lines on my reMarkable
- Ask Claude Code to read the PDF and remove lines that are crossed out and move starred lines to top
It… works!
Chris Nebel:
A problem with asking AI to do something you are unable to do yourself is that you are likely also unable to tell if the AI did a good job. It’s automated Dunning-Kruger.
Chris Pirillo:
This is the future of software. How we get there (eventually) is still anybody’s guess.
She was sitting in front of the advent calendars and asked if I still had that Gemini app installed. “Of course,” I said. To which she responded with the sudden need to create a game.
My 11 year-old daughter is vibe coding on her own volition. What’s your excuse?
David Smith:
the one cautious experiment I ran was a mixed bag:
- It produced the same approach to an esoteric problem (vectorized UTF16 transcoding in Swift) that I would have
- It produced a useful unit test suite
- It could discuss the code it produced in relevant abstractions and make changes I requested
but
- It had syntax errors initially
- It duplicated code unless specifically instructed to refactor
- When I accidentally asked for something impossible it generated nonsense
Paul Hudson:
Building apps in Swift and SwiftUI isn’t quite as easy for AI tools as other platforms, partly because our language and frameworks evolve rapidly, partly because languages such as Python and JavaScript have a larger codebase to learn from, and partly also because AI tools struggle with Swift concurrency as much as everyone else.
As a result, tools like Claude, Codex, and Gemini often make unhelpful choices you should watch out for. Sometimes you’ll come across deprecated API, sometimes it’s inefficient code, and sometimes it’s just something we can write more concisely, but they are all easy enough to fix so the key is just to know what to expect!
Quinn:
In recent months there’s been a spate of forums threads involving ‘hallucinated’ entitlements. This typically pans out as follows:
- The developer, or an agent working on behalf of the developer, changes their
.entitlements file to claim an entitlement that’s not real. That is, the entitlement key is a value that is not, and never has been, supported in any way. - Xcode’s code signing machinery tries to find or create a provisioning profile to authorise this claim.
- That’s impossible, because the entitlement isn’t a real entitlement. Xcode reports this as a code signing error.
Martin Alderson (Hacker News):
I’ve been building software professionally for nearly 20 years. I’ve been through a lot of changes - the ‘birth’ of SaaS, the mass shift towards mobile apps, the outrageous hype around blockchain, and the perennial promise that low-code would make developers obsolete.
The economics have changed dramatically now with agentic coding, and it is going to totally transform the software development industry (and the wider economy). 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard.
[…]
AI Agents however in my mind massively reduce the labour cost of developing software.
[…]
A project that would have taken a month now takes a week. The thinking time is roughly the same - the implementation time collapsed. And with smaller teams, you get the inverse of Brooks’s Law: instead of communication overhead scaling with headcount, it disappears. A handful of people can suddenly achieve an order of magnitude more.
John Voorhees:
This week on AppStories, Federico and I talked about the personal productivity tools we’ve built for ourselves using Claude. They’re hyper-specific scripts and plugins that aren’t likely to be useful to anyone but us, which is fine because that’s all they’re intended to be.
Stu Maschwitz took a different approach. He’s had a complex shortcut called Drinking Buddy for years that tracks alcohol consumption and calculates your Blood Alcohol Level using an established formula. But because he was butting up against the limits of what Shortcuts can do, he vibe coded an iOS version of Drinking Buddy.
Andy Jones:
But while it took horses decades to be overcome, and chess masters years, it took me all of six months to be surpassed.
Surpassed by a system that costs one thousand times less than I do.
Emil Stenström:
I recently released JustHTML, a python-based HTML5 parser. It passes 100% of the html5lib test suite, has zero dependencies, and includes a CSS selector query API. Writing it taught me a lot about how to work with coding agents effectively.
Rory Prior:
Cursor is so much better and more efficient at working with iOS projects it put’s Apple’s lame efforts at AI integration in Xcode to shame. I really miss Alex, it’s a crying shame Apple didn’t buy them and let them get sucked into OpenAI to get memory holed instead.
Working on one of my apps that traces its codebase back to iPhone OS 2, and it’s making it a breeze to go from Obj-C > Swift and then modernise the code at the same time.
Kyle Hughes:
The juxtaposition of my social circle of peers who are excited that AI is finally almost behind us because a snake oil bubble is about to pop, and my own experience that everything is finally all clicking and I am addicted to doing the best work of my life faster than I ever thought possible is challenging!
Christoph Nakazawa:
2025 will be looked back on as the most transformative time in software engineering. Previously, LLMs could build simple toy apps but weren’t good enough to build anything substantial. I’m convinced that has now changed, and I’m sharing my thoughts and pro tips.
Bruno Borges:
AI has dramatically accelerated how software is written. But speed was never the real bottleneck.
Despite LLMs, The Mythical Man-Month is still surprisingly relevant. Not because of how code is produced, but because of what actually slows software down: coordination, shared understanding, and conceptual integrity.
AI makes code cheap. It does not make software design, architecture, integration, or alignment free.
In fact, faster code generation can amplify old problems[…]
Dare Obasanjo:
Software engineering is in an interesting place where some of the most accomplished engineers in the industry are effectively saying their job is now just telling AI to write all the code, debug it and fix the bugs.
Some of this is obviously marketing hype from people who are selling AI tools (Boris works on Claude Code) but this is the current mindset of the industry.
Mitchell Hashimoto:
Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don’t know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
Gergely Orosz:
More people than ever before will want to learn how to build software using AI: software that works as they expect.
Demand for “fast track to becoming an AI-enabled dev” will probably skyrocket.
Gregor:
The tricky part is that good vibe coding still requires you to think like a programmer even if you cannot write the code yourself.
You need to break problems down, understand what is possible, and know when the AI is going off track.
Minh Nhat Nguyen:
About half the productivity gain from AI vibe coding comes from the fact that I can work ~80% as effectively and engaged when im tired, whereas previously it would be impossible to do anything mentally complex
David Heinemeier Hansson:
At the end of last year, AI agents really came alive for me. Partly because the models got better, but more so because we gave them the tools to take their capacity beyond pure reasoning. Now coding agents are controlling the terminal, running tests to validate their work, searching the web for documentation, and using web services with skills we taught them in plain English. Reality is fast catching the hype!
[…]
See, I never really cared much for the in-editor experience of having AI autocomplete your code as you were writing it. […] But with these autonomous agents, the experience is very different. It’s more like working on a team and less like working with an overly-zealous pair programmer who can’t stop stealing the keyboard to complete the code you were in the middle of writing. With a team of agents, they’re doing their work autonomously, and I just review the final outcome, offer guidance when asked, and marvel at how this is possible at all.
Jordan Morgan:
Agents are amazing at coding now, no surprise there. One way to use them that I’ve found valuable is as a tutor, relating new tech stacks to me using familiar parallels from SwiftUI and iOS development.
Daniel Jalkut:
Yes, I use Claude because it helps me fix more bugs faster. (It also helps with some useful automation.)
Amy Worrall:
I’ve been trying to use Claude to write some AppKit code. It’s very interesting how different it feels using AI for a framework that has a lower quantity of decent examples in the training data. The AI is very quick to make decisions that show only a reasonably superficial understanding.
I spent last night debugging auto layout constraints. I’m not great at auto layout, but the difference is I know my limits, and won’t write any that I don’t understand the implications of!
Adam Bell:
I think my favourite feature of LLMs is how, when asked to fix a bug in a feature, their predicted solution is to simply delete the feature that has the bug
Heshie Brody:
I don’t think self vibecoded software is the future for businesses
A couple of months ago I vibecoded a tool for a friends business
his entire staff has been using it for six months now (37 people)
the thing is, he’s constantly sending me feature requests, bug fixes
The app is pretty complicated since it deals with insurance benefits verification
so for someone that doesn’t have software development experience you can’t just prompt to fix it (believe me, he tried)
Aaron Levie:
Traditionally, software companies have been stuck within the constraints of existing IT budgets, which tend to tap out around 3-7% of a company’s revenue. This creates an inherent upper limit for what the budget can be for software, which translates into the total addressable market of various technology categories. Now, with AI Agents, the software is actually bringing along the work with the software, which means the budget software players are going after is the total spend that goes into doing that work in the company, not just the tech to enable it. This inevitably leads to a substantial increase in TAM for most software categories whose markets were artificially held back in size previously.
[…]
Today, the vast majority of SaaS products charge on a per-seat basis, which generally corresponds to most of the usage that the software sees today by its end users. But in a world where AI agents do most of the interaction and work on software, enterprise systems will have to evolve to support more of a consumption and usage-based model over time. AI agents don’t cleanly fit as seats on software, because any given AI agent can do a varied amount of work within a system (e.g. you could have 1 agent doing a billion things or a billion agents doing one thing).
Jordan Morgan:
Skills, rules, plugins, MCPs, different models — I went in. And, coming out the other side, I’m not entirely certain what to think anymore. Excitement? Nervous? Pumped? All of it?
It’s all different now, but I do know that if you were already an engineer with experience before this AI boom, there has never been a better time in human history to build stuff.
Perry E. Metzger:
I recently used ChatGPT Codex to find a terrible bug that had been lurking for decades in a codebase without being tracked down. It worked for an hour and fifteen minutes autonomously, produced a reproducing case, carefully ran the debugger, and handed me both the problem and a patch at the end.
Claims like “LLMs can’t debug code” are at complete variance with the real world experience of vast numbers of people.
Mo Bitar (Hacker News):
Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. And most agents simply surrender once they feel the problem and solution has gotten away from them (though this rarely happens anymore, since agents will just force themselves through the walls of the maze.)
What’s worse is code that agents write looks plausible and impressive while it’s being written and presented to you. It even looks good in pull requests (as both you and the agent are well trained in what a “good” pull request looks like).
It’s not until I opened up the full codebase and read its latest state cover to cover that I began to see what we theorized and hoped was only a diminishing artifact of earlier models: slop.
It was pure, unadulterated slop. I was bewildered. Had I not reviewed every line of code before admitting it? Where did all this...gunk..come from?
Miklós Koren et al. (Hacker News):
We study the equilibrium effects of vibe coding on the OSS ecosystem. We develop a model with endogenous entry and heterogeneous project quality in which OSS is a scalable input into producing more software. Users choose whether to use OSS directly or through vibe coding. Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns. When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid.
Andrew Burwell:
I don’t know how to program, and have never made an application. I’m a designer, and an SME for the type of app I was able to create with Claude Code. This opens up a world of possibilities for me and I now have a list of apps for my hobby (astrophotography) that i’m creating. My first app, Laminar.
Miguel Arroz:
From what I’ve seen so far by reading the Swift code generated by these things, they are definitely not up to the task, and anyone who thinks so either is doing trivial stuff with them, or has a very different idea of software quality than me.
This is what bothers me most. If these things were actually good, we could solve all the other problems (energy, copyrights, etc). But it’s just not worth it. The result is bad and the frustrating process of iterating leads to nowhere.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-09): Steve Troughton-Smith:
Much as you don’t generally go auditing the bytecode or intermediate representation generated by your compiler, I think the idea of manually reviewing LLM-written code will fall by the wayside too. Like it or not, these agents are the new compilers, and prompting them is the new programming. Regardless of what happens with any AI bubble, this is just how things will be from now on; we’ve experienced a permanent, irreversible increase to the level of abstraction. We are all assembly programmers
Ken Kocienda (Mastodon):
AI coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor have changed the way I work. My daily programming today looks nothing like it did even a couple years ago. Today, I hardly ever write individual lines of code. AI coding assistants has relieved me of this. It’s better at it than I am. I’m OK with that.
[…]
Now that I can delegate a lot of this work AI coding assistants, and that means I can focus more on thinking about exactly what I want to make, rather than tediously and laboriously trying to achieve my desired effects. I now spend more time thinking about the edifice as a whole, rather than on building it up brick by brick.
[…]
Today, optimizing [assemblers] lie several levels beneath the notice of contemporary real programmers. Over time, we have simply come to accept the loss of detail Mel thought was essential to proper work—since it wasn’t actually essential to the task. It was merely essential to Mel’s view of himself as a programmer.
Dan Shapiro (via Matt Massicotte):
Ward Cunningham coined the phrase “technical debt” in 1992. He was working on a financial application called WyCash and needed a metaphor to explain to his boss why they should spend time improving their code instead of shipping the next feature. For decades, the balance was simple: carry a little debt to move faster, but pay it down as soon as you can, or the accumulated mess will overwhelm and bankrupt you.
[…]
Usually, deflation is bad for debtors because money becomes harder to come by. But technical debt is different: you don’t owe money, you owe work. And the cost of work is what’s deflating. The cost to pay off your debt – the literal dollars and hours required to fix the mess – is diminishing. It is cheaper to clean up your code today than it has ever been. And if you put it off? It becomes cheaper still. This leads to a striking reversal: technical debt becomes a wise investment.
[…]
This leads to a surprising conclusion for anyone managing a roadmap. You should be willing to take on more technical debt than you ever would have before.
Please don’t give Federighi any ideas.
Nolan Lawson (Hacker News, Mastodon):
I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it.
I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent, reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production.
[…]
If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. We are the last of our kind, and those who follow us won’t understand our sorrow. Our craft, as we have practiced it, will end up like some blacksmith’s tool in an archeological dig, a curio for future generations. It cannot be helped, it is the nature of all things to pass to dust, and yet still we can mourn. Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft.
Wade Tregaskis:
Do you think there will remain a market for “artisanal” coders making “luxury” apps even after AI takes over the mainstream? Like how you can still buy bespoke and boutique furniture even in a world of IKEA?
Jurgis Kirsakmens:
LLM AI programming agents are not good for mental health, it supercharges FOMO and takes procrastination to next level.
I have about 20 large changesets across 2 computers and 5 repos generated with AI agents ready to be pushed that I just can’t force myself to review/take a look at.
Meanwhile there are small changes my apps need that I’m avoiding to do because I HAVE TO BE ON THE FUTURE TRAIN.
Jeff Johnson:
I’ve always been skeptical of the alleged productivity gains of Swift over Objective-C. That goes double for the alleged productivity gains of LLMs over manual coding. ;-)
My view is that if coding speed is the bottleneck in your development process, you’re probably coding too fast. Perhaps you should slow down and THINK more about your product and especially your users.
Daniel Jalkut:
Nobody who claims AI is oversold hype has ever had a 5 day problem reduced to a 15 minute, interactive solution. Again and again. You do have to know how to use it.
Mark Levison:
I’ve also seen codebases where many five day problems have been added in 1000+ line commits from misuse of the these tools.
Siddhant Khare:
I shipped more code last quarter than any quarter in my career. I also felt more drained than any quarter in my career. These two facts are not unrelated.
[…]
AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That’s not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.
But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.
Update (2026-02-20): Andrej Karpathy:
I think it must be a very interesting time to be in programming languages and formal methods because LLMs change the whole constraints landscape of software completely. Hints of this can already be seen, e.g. in the rising momentum behind porting C to Rust or the growing interest in upgrading legacy code bases in COBOL or etc. In particular, LLMs are especially good at translation compared to de-novo generation because 1) the original code base acts as a kind of highly detailed prompt, and 2) as a reference to write concrete tests with respect to. That said, even Rust is nowhere near optimal for LLMs as a target language. What kind of language is optimal? What concessions (if any) are still carved out for humans? Incredibly interesting new questions and opportunities. It feels likely that we’ll end up re-writing large fractions of all software ever written many times over.
Chris Lattner:
100% agree with you Andrej. We’re building Mojo to be that target and seeing great results. People are already one-shotting large python conversions to Mojo and getting 1000x speedups.
Malin Sundberg:
The frequency of me launching and just leave Xcode in this state becomes higher and higher with every model update…
Joseph Heck:
So if you’re trying this agentic coding thing out, there are a couple key pieces of advice that made a huge difference for me.
Artificial Intelligence Business ChatGPT Claude Cocoa Craft Entitlements Google Gemini/Bard iOS iOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Open-source Software Programming Python Swift Programming Language SwiftData SwiftUI
Apple (RC xip, downloads, Hacker News):
Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps, powered by coding agents from Anthropic and OpenAI. With agentic coding, Xcode can work autonomously toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture, and using built-in tools to get things done.
In addition to Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex integrations, Xcode 26.3 makes its capabilities available through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives developers the flexibility to use any compatible agent or tool with Xcode.
For more information, see Setting up coding intelligence.
John Voorhees:
The agent sits in Xcode’s sidebar where developers can use it to plan new features, implement them, and review the results. As developers work, the agent generates a transcript of its actions, which lets developers follow along and interact with it. For example, code snippets will appear in the sidebar that can be clicked to take developers directly to the spot in the file where the agent made a change. Code updates can also be simultaneously previewed.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
So Xcode just builds entire apps without you now
Xcode’s Codex support will happily trundle away for half an hour sticking its tendrils into every little corner of your project, touching and changing every file. It’s certainly going to be fun to build new projects with, but ain’t no way in hell I want to let that loose on any of my existing apps 😂
Rui Carmo:
Xcode 26.3 getting official Claude and Codex integration without the usual guardrails is interesting enough, but having MCP in the mix is… unusually open for Apple.
[…]
But at least they seem to have done their homework where it regards the in-editor agent harness–not sure how deep they went into IDE primitives (file graph, docs search, project settings), though, and the apparent lack of skills and other creature comforts that all the VS Code–based tools have is a bit of a bummer.
John Gruber:
I don’t know if this is super-duper interesting news, but I think it’s super-duper interesting that Apple saw the need to release this now, not at WWDC in June.
They couldn’t even wait for the final version to be shipping before sending out the press release.
Jason Anthony Guy:
I presume Apple announced these integrations now, and not at WWDC, to capture some of the frenzy surrounding tools like Cursor and Copilot.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
As a heads-up, it’s around this time of year that Xcode traditionally goes new-OS-only, i.e. requires macOS 26.
They haven’t done that with Xcode 26.3 just yet, but you might find that this is the last point release to run on Sequoia.
Juli Clover:
AI models can access more of Xcode’s features to work toward a project goal, and Apple worked directly with Anthropic and OpenAI to configure their agents for use in Xcode. Agents can create new files, examine the structure of a project in Xcode, build a project directly and run tests, take image snapshots to double-check work, and access full Apple developer documentation that has been designed for AI agents.
Saagar Jha:
If you’re an developer for Apple’s platforms and were wondering where you rank in their list of priorities consider that they were apparently capable of writing docs and adding meaningful Xcode integrations all this time but they decided to do it to help AI models instead of you.
Artem Novichkov:
This repository contains system prompts and documentation from Xcode 26.3, providing insights into Apple’s approach to AI-assisted coding and comprehensive guides for iOS 26 features and frameworks.
Artem Novichkov:
Combine is officially dead. Quote from Xcode 26.3 AgentSystemPromptAddition:
Avoid using the Combine framework and instead prefer to use Swift’s async and await versions of APIs instead.
It’s still not officially deprecated, but it’s obviously not preferred for new development.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-05): Dimitri Bouniol:
512 GB is a rough starting SSD size for development… All I did is install Xcode, my usual git repos, and a few other apps, and I’m already at >50% used before anything iCloud has even been touched…
Jordan Morgan:
Apple has honed in their config.toml to supercharge iOS development. Notes on Liquid Glass, call outs for Foundation Models — the list goes on. Though Apple blasts the doors off of their “big” stuff at W.W.D.C., you’d be crazy to think they aren’t paying attention. How we develop software is changing, and internally, it’s clear they are humming along with it. The fact that Xcode 26.3 exists, right now, is proof. They didn’t just cut a new branch once Codex’s macOS app shipped.
[…]
So, how is the actual experience? Well, pretty nice! This is such a tiny thing, but in Terminal — removing a chunk of text sucks. I’m sure there is some keyboard shortcut I’m missing, or some other app I could use like iTerm or what have you, but not being able to use Command+A and then delete it hurts. In Xcode, that’s easily done because the input is not longer running through Terminal, it’s just an AppKit text entry control.
[…]
This is a fantastic start for Xcode. If you’re later to the Claude Code or Codex scene, this is a wonderful place to start. There’s simply no going back once you learn how to use these tools. Ideas that you wanted to hack on become doable, those dusty side project folders come alive a bit more, and you get ideas out of your head much faster.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
I handed it the classic SameGame codebase, gave it my coding style markdown file, and said “So this is an old ObjC app for iOS. I would like you to completely convert it 1:1 to modern Swift, with the coding style in mind. Leave no ObjC behind”
No other prompts needed; I needed to update a few legacy things in the xcode project settings (min OS version, Swift version, etc), and got this[…] All automatic, not a line of ObjC remains. Deprecated APIs were all modernized. 5,400 lines of ObjC became 2900 lines of Swift 5.
Paul Haddad:
I really hate to say it, but at least on a test project, this Xcode 26.3 coding agent stuff is pretty good. I can see why some are going gaga over it.
My main concern (other than copyright, which for some reason companies seem to ignore) is that it makes it to easy to just trust the generated code. You start reading things line by line and after a few minutes its hard not to skim over the suggested bits that get added.
Update (2026-02-06): Christian Tietze (Mastodon):
For example, ever wondered when to use the new InlineArray? See Swift-InlineArray-Span.md[…]
[…]
That is a very good summary that is painfully absent on the InlineArray API docs. As a Swift veteran, you usually look for a Swift Evolution proposal for the new tech then an try to find out there what this is all about.
[…]
The collection also has docs for 3D charts, VisualIntelligence (I didn’t know that framework existed!), and UIKit Liquid Glass guides and AttributedString tutorials.
These documents are probably not written by a human, or team of humans, because of inconsistent tone and all. So I’d wager they were LLM-generated themselves. I do hope they were edited for misinformation at least!
Update (2026-02-09): Steve Troughton-Smith:
From what I’ve seen, Xcode/Codex is way better at creating great UIKit-or-AppKit-based apps than great SwiftUI apps, probably because there’s so much more source material to reference and train on, and hierarchies are more rigid and well-defined.
Gui Rambo:
All of my attempts at having LLMs create SwiftUI apps ended up in frustration, but I’ve been playing around with a UIKit app for a couple of days now and getting very interesting results 👀
I think the syntax of SwiftUI itself is particularly confusing for LLMs. I’ve seen many models mess up things such as opening and closing braces when writing complex SwiftUI code. They also tend to bake too much business logic in view code instead of modularizing things, which doesn’t happen when doing UIKit.
Jacob Bartlett:
Simultaneously, agentic AI tooling has trivialised the overhead of writing imperative layout boilerplate. Two key disadvantages of UIKit, slow development and verbose APIs, have been negated. The models are also trained on mountains of UIKit code and docs. Good luck one-shooting fresh SwiftUI APIs like TextEditor.
In 2025, the question is unavoidable:
Should you start migrating back to UIKit?
Steve Troughton-Smith:
🛠️ Have you been using any of the new agentic tools in Xcode 26.3? What have you been using it for, and how has it fared?
I’m curious to hear everybody else’s stories, rather than just talk about mine all the time.
Gui Rambo:
I’ve spent several hours today playing around with agents in Xcode 26.3. There are lots of things I like with the integration, but by far the most frustrating aspect is that the agents will sometimes just “forget” that they’re running inside Xcode and start trying to run terminal commands for things that they can do with the Xcode integration, even simple things such as reading content from files. The good thing is that telling them to use Xcode instead usually works.
Marcel Weiher:
Has anybody else seen the scrollbars being wildly off in Xcode/Tahoe?
I had a find operation, and even though there were only 3 occurrences, the scrollbar kept showing me moving down in the file even when it was actually wrapping around to the top.
Christian Tietze:
Xcode 26.3 still can’t deal with you typing into a file while the file changes on disk without freezing (after displaying 2 alerts that block each other)
Update (2026-02-19): Two weeks later, the final version of Xcode 26.3 still isn’t available, and Apple has released an Xcode 26.4 beta.
Xcode Releases:
So while this is definitely unusual, it’s not unprecedented. If history is any guide, I expect we’ll see the final release Xcode 26.3 within the next couple of days, and it will likely be identical to the Release Candidate.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Unsurprisingly, but still disappointingly, there’s been no update to the bundled version of Codex, which is stuck on gpt-5.2-codex
Update (2026-02-20): Xcode 26.3 RC 2 (xip, downloads):
Xcode 26.3 RC 2 includes Swift 6.2.3 and SDKs for iOS 26.2, iPadOS 26.2, tvOS 26.2, macOS 26.2, and visionOS 26.2.
Once again, the release notes don’t call out what’s new in this build, but diffing shows this major change:
Xcode 26.3 introduces a comprehensive permissions system that gives
you fine-grained control over what external agentic coding tools can do in
your development environment.
And lots of bug fixes, mostly related to AI.
Xcode Releases:
I wonder if there's something weird about .3 releases… #Xcode 16.3, 15.3, and 14.3 all had two release candidates.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The RC 2 version of Xcode 26.3 does indeed distribute a new version of Codex that enables the gpt-5.3-codex model.
I would guess that’s why they waited before publishing 26.3 to the App Store, and it also answers the question as to how their model update strategy might play out.
Renaud Lienhart:
Just noticed this new adaptive control in Xcode 26.4 😮
Artificial Intelligence Claude Cocoa Codex Combine framework Documentation Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Model Context Protocol (MCP) Programming SwiftUI Xcode
Matt Gemmell (Mastodon, Hacker News):
Executives, experts, engineers, and designers are all leaving for more lucrative positions at even less scrupulous companies. Apple is currently the GUI laughing stock of the industry, a position once firmly held by Microsoft for decades, and the walking-back of poor decisions in followup point-releases has become normal. Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop. Now, these missteps come from the company itself.
[…]
Interface designers must have the same maxim as doctors: primum non nocere, and Apple could previously always be relied upon to remember and demonstrate it. Those days are apparently gone for now, replaced with whim and indulgence; tech demos canonised by whatever shoehorning is necessary. Putting aside the ugliness, and both inaptness and ineptness of the implementation, the largest problem with Liquid Glass is that it is so damned ominous. It portends, or perhaps reveals, a rot; an erosion in the core where Apple has always been distinct and steadfast.
[…]
The thing is, for now at least, none of this seems to matter, because the investors are happy. Apple is the gold standard for hyper-profitability and predatory monetisation. Huge margins, hardware which runs only their own operating systems, operating systems that run only approved software (with even the Mac creeping ever-closer to an iOS-style lockdown), and software which pays its tithe to Cupertino at every stage. Leverage upon leverage, incompatible with our quaint old-world perceptions of ownership, so long as the money flows.
[…]
The company feels like a performance of itself[…]
Unlike him, I think Apple’s hardware is mostly going fine, but I agree with the general thrust that Apple’s success has hidden problems. The last line really resonates. At times, the company seems like a cargo cult, repeating mantras from a previous era without actually following them and applying the same strategies as before even though they no longer make sense.
The Macalope:
We are experiencing a period of great angst in the Apple community, and most of it is the result of Tim Cook’s leadership. Cook has done a tremendous job over the years, building on Apple’s success and taking the company to new heights. For years, the Macalope skewered pundits who suggested Cook was a failure for not delivering a product as successful as the iPhone, as if it were reasonable to suggest he deliver another once-in-a-lifetime product. Cook’s tenure has been one of mature, stable stewardship, and over the more than decade and a half he’s led the company, Apple continued to ship hits like the Apple Watch and AirPods.
The problem is that we didn’t get stable stewardship. Apple’s software and developer relations fell apart on his watch.
Nathan Manceaux-Panot:
The Apple indie dev community is undergoing an identity crisis. For decades, whatever Apple said was good, was good. People mostly agreed with their ethics, design priorities, way of doing business.
Now that all of that has, well, severely degraded, it leaves us in the dark. The north star is gone.
See also: Warner Crocker, Dare Obasanjo, Kevin Renskers, Matt Gemmell.
Previously:
Update (2026-02-10): Dr. Drang:
It’s not that I don’t know what the single hollow squircle button does—I’ve been using it for 16 months. The icon could look like Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing of an asshole in Breakfast of Champions and I’d soon work out what the button was for, but the purpose of an icon is to communicate, not just be a placeholder. There’s also parallelism to consider. The icon view button looks like the screen it leads to; so should the split screen view button.
It’s probably impossible to tell the upper echelon of Apple that it’s breaking revenue records in spite of its software design, not because of it.
Update (2026-02-20): Nicolas Magand:
This collective reaction is strong because Apple is not a brand usually associated with poor quality, odd design choices, or a lack of attention to detail. It is particularly notable on the Mac, arguably the most prominent Apple software product when it comes to enthusiasm about the brand and what they stand for.
Today, some of the Apple observers and critics are almost in shock of how fast things went bad. There were warning signs before, but the core foundations of what makes the Mac a great computing platform didn’t seem threatened. The problems seemed limited to a few bugs and side apps that were quickly filed under mishaps, and the growing popularity of non-native apps that ignore Mac conventions. Now, even MacOS itself is plagued with symptoms of the “unrefined” disease. Is MacOS becoming another Windows?
[…]
For users like me, who appreciate a certain level of precision and craftsmanship in software and love Apple because of that — especially the Mac — this trend is worrisome. We know that Apple is not going away, but the Apple we love seems distracted. We worry that the Mac won’t ever feel like the Mac we love today again. We worry that our habits, our taste, and our commitments to a platform will become pointless and dépassés. We worry because there is not a proper alternative to the Mac environment.
[…]
But I thought of something that may sound like wishful thinking: What if Apple is having its own BMW-Neue-Klasse moment?
Jack Baty:
Surprisingly, I am starting to prefer being in Linux than being in macOS. Linux feels like it’s mine and I like that feeling. Everything in the OS makes me believe it was done with me mind. “Me” being “the user”. Even when things are frustrating, I usually understand why. macOS used to feel this way, but has drifted from it. It’s not all Tahoe’s fault, but it certainly hasn’t helped.
What I miss most about running macOS is not macOS. It’s the software. The polish.
Via Mike Rockwell:
Most of what I use on my Linux machine is great, but some applications just aren’t up to par with what’s available on macOS. I still prefer the Linux environment because I can fully control it, but that doesn’t keep me from missing the niceties of Mac apps.
Apple Apple Vision Pro Artificial Intelligence Design iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Siri Tim Cook visionOS visionOS 26
