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I’m a SwiftUI developer at $DAY_JOB so maybe biased but while Claude can make things that look right it’s still not exactly perfect. Especially from designs. I used Claude design to mockup a monitoring app for my talos cluster and Claude code totally freestyled it. What should have been as simple as `List { Section(“title”) { … } }` got morphed into whacky DIY `VStack {}.background(.gray)` nonsense.

It looks off and it’s suboptimal performance-wise. It was, I’d say, 80% of a proper SwiftUI app (which is really fantastic given it was basically a one-shot).

Actually knowing SwiftUI meant it was trivial for me to just close out that remaining 20% by hand and have an actually *nice* cross platform (iOS, iPadOS, macOS) app.

I’m sure I could have prompted it to get it done right but without proper knowledge on the subject I wouldnt even know what was wrong and Claude doesn’t do so hot with “that just feels wrong”. Beyond that it was quicker to do it myself, but maybe I just need to prompt better /:

by tptacek26 days ago|

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I have absolutely no doubt that an experienced SwiftUI macOS developer could easily produce better UI than Claude can today. The thing is, Claude produces better UI than a replacement-level macOS developer can, and, much more importantly --- this is really the core of my argument --- \infty better UI than a typical developer can produce, because most developers don't ever build native UI.

If I'm shipping a product where each development/release cycle costs my team $5MM, I am absolutely going to spring for the professional SwiftUI developer.

But most things normal developers build in their spare time don't even cost $50 per cycle. Unless they're UI learning projects or projects by UI experts, there is no "budget" for UI. At best, for real labor-of-love projects, you get a TUI where the developer spends 5 hours of their life that they will never get back creating a 70%-functional terminal version of the affordances the native UI toolkit provides out of the box.

That's all over now. However competitive Claude-generated SwiftUI user interfaces are with expert SwiftUI projects, they roflstomp the UI options available to most developers. I can't say enough what a smoking gun the flickering Signal app is here!