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mholttoday at 6:07 PM6 repliesview on HN

Of the 3 models I tried, Grok did the best at making an iOS app I wanted for personal use (a bike computer with specific qualities). (Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal.) Grok definitely fumbles sometimes, but I have been surprised what it CAN intuit versus me having to micromanage it.

(I am not an iOS developer, so getting something specific that I needed in a few hours/days was really helpful instead of spending months/years learning the language, APIs, etc.) (I am absolutely not "vibe-coding" Caddy btw, just tinkering with it for personal projects.)


Replies

_fizz_buzz_today at 7:33 PM

> Claude just gave up and did an HTML/CSS implementation but I insisted on native SwiftUI+Metal.

That sounds very odd and very contrary to my experience. You don’t say which model you actually used, but I never had opus 4.8 (or sonnet for that matter) ignore which language/stack i wanted to use.

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Schiendelmantoday at 6:13 PM

I do a lot of native iOS development using Opus 4.8 (and I used 4.7/4.6 before this). I have a very hard time with this comment, were you using Opus or something else?

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wetttoday at 7:50 PM

I swear I have read either this exact or a very similar comment before. Same gist about a bike computer iOS app, and one of the models giving up.

As an aside, big thanks for Caddy! Really helped me get my greenfield project off the ground and it simply “just working” out of the box was one less source of errors I had to worry about when onboarding my team.

Tiberiumtoday at 6:10 PM

Was this in Claude Code for Claude? Did you use a weaker model like Haiku? Claude should absolutely not be as bad as you said.

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yottamustoday at 7:38 PM

As someone also not happy with my bike computer (some truly horrific UI/UX decisions), could you share or explain what you made? I like your web server.

jiocragtoday at 6:50 PM

There's no way this is true.