Leon Breedt

This is my fourth go at this app.

Chronologically (1.5 years elapsed, working on it on weekends only, it's not my job):

• SwiftUI v1: failed, due to my poor understanding of SwiftUI, lost the will to keep hacking to get native Apple-like UX

• SwiftUI + SwiftData v2: failed, could not get performance and UX how i wanted.

• SwiftUI + CloudKit + Core Data + Swift Data v3: a terrible idea, do not have two persistence layers trying to co-operate.

• UIKit + CloudKit + CoreData v4: shipped on Apple Store within 4 months of first rewrite commit

(* with some assistance from LLMs since I am not a UIKit expert)

NOTE: it would have been longer than 4 months had I not failed awfully a few times :)

cc @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social

https://sector42.io/plate/

Told my 9 y.o. son if he wanted a PC of his own he’s going to have to build it. He called my bluff, got a book from the library on how to build a gaming PC, got enamored with SFF PCs, so now we’re doing this 🤣 Talk about hard mode, starting in the FormD T1 case for your first build.

@parisba@cloudisland.nz it should be illegal in this day and age to lock out legitimate users from their digital life like this with no recourse or appeal

The harness for my iOS app development:

• A single self-contained Rust CLI that only depends on xcrun and xcodebuild
• Returns a reliable, structured and consistent response for every sub-command it runs
• Responses are optimized so LLMs can efficiently know success/failure, get hints on problem resolution and have links to logs and more detail if something went wrong
• Manages a pool of cached simulators and manages locking/contention between them so I can have multiple agent sessions that still performantly run UI and unit tests
• Allows IDB-like interaction with UIs so agents can tap through the UI tree (which is full accessibility ID instrumented)

Before this harness the LLM would spin for a long time while trying to click a bloody button and keep having to rediscover how to do this. Not helped by simulators getting stuck from time to time.

Now the LLM has a semantic tree of UI controls with IDs, taps on them with ease, and in case of a problem like a stuck simulator, simple nukes and re-creates it quickly with this tool.

@jensimmons@front-end.social 🎉👍 it’s literally the reason I had an alternate Chrome based browser installed. Thank you!

Threw my son’s new PC NVIDIA stability issue at Fable 5, one shotted in minutes. Bloody riser cable! Which I should have known, having had issues with them in the past. Amazing analysis.

@ripienaar@devco.social As a past owner of several German cars (hello Audi, BMW, VW), never again. “Value-engineered” overpriced pieces of shit. A BYD literally feels like a better made car. There’s a reason Down Under they have gone from zero to second in market share in two years, because you’re getting a good deal and even the base models are decent trim.

@ripienaar@devco.social thanks, the last 80% took way longer than the first 80%

@ripienaar@devco.social it's on my list to investigate if this could make it possible: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreData/sharing-core-data-objects-between-icloud-users i use CoreData/CloudKit as i don't wanna run my own servers, deal with data/privacy issues.

@ripienaar@devco.social yep looks possible, i will add it to the roadmap - we would use it also :) would likely come in the form of something like "share my library" with R/O and R/W flavours.

@ripienaar@devco.social you need a more belt and braces fix

@lkanies@hachyderm.io @ripienaar@devco.social I wouldn't claim to have solved sync, but I found it a lot easier from a mental model perspective to just do last-write-wins with merge when receiving updates from CloudKit, store photos as CKAssets, and not try to do any kind of ordering or sequencing of any changes. One outbound queue for local writes going up to the cloud, one separate inbound queue for processing updates, inbound queue can never trigger anything that would cause something to enter outbound queue, to avoid feedback loops. It does mean users of my app see weirdness like photos for entities arriving before the entity text on a brand new device, but have had zero complaints about "lost updates" since switching to this model. Oh, and I got a *lot* less frustrating outcomes using UIKit rather than SwiftUI. Uglier code, but LLMs seem to have less difficulty with it, more OOTB performance.

@khaost@mastodon.tz.is bloody hell, is this why CloudKit notifications of change are not reaching my app on 26.4 test device? I’ve spent a day combing through my code convinced I have a bug. Works for Mac app though, so must be restricted to iOS?