Seeing less build-in-public even from the "let's clone each other's AI mushroom identifier apps" crowd
Indie Dark Forest era has begun
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Ivan Mir
@ivmirx@mas.to
mastodon 4.7.2🚧 building indie apps
🌻 caring for the land
☸️ trying to stay heedful
may all beings be happy~
253 Followers
231 Following
28 Posts
Joined November 12, 2022
Our indie team:
Location:
Valdivia (Ainileufu), Chile
Getting Studio M4 Max 64 GB and then Mini M4 24 GB for my wife last year somehow ended up as my most successful investment in years :welp:
Hacker News has lost its value as a random seed for learning about unrelated stuff
Humanities-leaning front-page submissions have basically disappeared from it, it's just another tech forum nowadays
Hey, Safari got squircles!
`corner-shape:` commit:
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/8be67bb856d275e88daaf93bb7c851f446590687
The first thing I did a year ago when starting LLM-centered development was getting rid of XIBs on iOS and XAMLs on Android.
Even back then, AI agents did great with imperative code-based layouts. I even made a simple DSL for constraints and Claude could use when it did not forget to.
Frameworks like SwiftUI were designed for the era when writing boilerplate was time-consuming. But it makes no difference anymore, while it's easier to debug and refactor imperative code.
I had Garmin Venu 2S, but the battery died in <2yrs and the new model is 3x the price, so I moved to Amazfit Active 2 and it's actually much cooler for a very modest cost
The best thing about app/game development is that you press ▶️ in the IDE and it just runs.
Even in 2026, it’s still a monolithic, self-contained program.
Meanwhile, deploying a static site with an email form on Cloudflare takes two hours even with Codex explaining you where to click in that endless dashboard to wire everything together.
RE: @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social
Each app has its own story, ConjuGato's one-time purchase revenue has been steadily climbing up since 2018
> NASA ran a study on a potential trip to Mars and found the most important trait for team dynamics was humor
Between Golden Kamuy, The Apothecary Diaries, A Bride's Story, Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, and now The Azure Balkanalia, it seems we're entering the golden age of historical anime/manga :BongoCatHearts:
"I like it a lot" :welp:
It seems I've achieved a fully agentic loop for iOS via https://maestro.dev, a simple skill, and a quick analogue of https://github.com/FLEXTool/FLEX
Codex can now modify Maestro configs to navigate the app in the simulator as needed, then get view trees by calling a simple HTTP server inside the app itself.
The efficiency remains to be seen, but I hope intermediate verifications won't require my attention anymore.
Every time I see things like that, I'm reminded how good I have it with C# for UIKit despite the GC/ARC clash.
And I'm also reminded how badly Microsoft fumbled the bag with cross-platform .NET – it could have had it all but instead they themselves ended up in the React world of web mess.
Getting an unzipped text database from 36 to 6 MB via byte-pair encoding is pure magic :gmail56sparkles:
RE: @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social
Some good news for people who prefer imperative UIs and for cross-platform devs relying on UIKit for assembling native UIs from C# and TypeScript
(I'm both)
Replying to
@ctietze that's how browser extensions have been reporting data to Qbserve since the beginning too :)
But for this case, it may be my cross-platform thinking because I'm doing it for both iOS and Android UIs at once, and also in .NET
I've never used XCUITests 🙈
Replying to
@ctietze my main problem was that accessibilityIdentifier apparently wasn't present in the native UI dumps (not the case on Android where UIAutomator includes them) and that's what I've been adding across the app for reliable multi-language UI automation
Replying to
@ctietze yes, I have a suspicion that from the LLM "point of view", repeating chunks of imperative layout code are easier to digest than declarative staircases with different indentation. They're more of discrete building blocks compared to the long method chain flow.
But I have no proofs, just an intuition of what modern coding agents do better.
Surprised Apple is not yet rejecting apps without dark/tinted icons. I'm trying out the dark glass mode on iOS 26 and bright icons really ruin it.
Peak millennial design at Brasília Airport
200 mm of rain in the last 24 hours, it's too much even for Valdivia
Replying to
@kyle@mister.computer @grork@mastodon.social typical signs are painful self-awareness & self-loathing combined with quips & irony poisoning
Replying to
@ryanpoolos@mstdn.social @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social it still lacks proper tooling after all these years. Storyboards were a dead-end mobile-first idea, but then they just abandoned any attempts to make a decent visual editor for UIKit, something Playgrounds-like would have made a huge difference.