Post #294691

2026-02-11 16:15 UTC

I’ve complained LLMs are bad at SwiftUI, and that’s not entirely accurate. It has bad default approaches, because it’s all trained stale StackOverflow answers. It can be steered in the right direction if you know what you’re doing, but that’s kind of the problem. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Apple needs to massively improve its documentation and sample code to overcome this. Thousands of sample projects, actively maintained. (Hi WWDR! Hire me to do this!)

Replies (5)

@clarko@mastodon.social 2026-02-11 21:52

Addendum: there’s bad SwiftUI code, ignorant of modern API, bashing HStacks and GeometryReaders together until something works. That needs training to overcome. Then there’s failures of the framework. Like how you can attach an alert to a button, but not if it’s inside a menu. Or how you can add toolbar items to a bare window on macOS but not on iOS. Those are failures of “learn once, write everywhere” and Apple needs to be better about them. Too many caveats, too many gotchas.

Open ##2949229
@DavidAnson@mastodon.social 2026-02-11 17:04

@clarko@mastodon.social Honest question: How many good samples do you think Apple would need to publish in order to appreciably move the needle versus all of the terrible code that everyone else in the world writes and LLMs get trained on?

Open ##2949230
@js@mastodon.nl 2026-02-11 21:59

@clarko@mastodon.social Or, read documentation and use brain rather than expect vibe bullshit to coagulate.

Open ##2949235
@timo@social.hetzel.net 2026-02-11 22:00

@clarko@mastodon.social @Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social I’ve seen little nudges result in a big improvement. Maybe compile a small set of good examples?

Open ##2949236
@kalleboo@bitbang.social 2026-02-12 11:48

@clarko@mastodon.social Whenever I've worked with SwiftUI, the documentation itself has been nearly useless unless you already know what you want to do and just need function names, Stack Overflow is full of out-of-date one-liners, half the time even Apple’s sample code doesn't compile. WWDC videos are all out of date, sometimes even for the release version of that year's OS. #iosdev… (1/2)

Open ##2949237