upvote
I'd like to add that there is almost no way of "running away" from it. If I search for anything on the internet I am almost guaranteed to be handed pages and pages of AI generated content. In lieu of that I found that directly prompting for an answer tends to yield better results nowadays. Not because it's good per-se, but because having control over the prompt beats having little to no control over it though search by proxy.

It saddens me to see that high quality content is drowned in this sea of garbage to the point of being almost impossible to find.

reply
I think this is where the circle closes with the "dead internet theory"... you go to Reddit, and see bots commenting on posts created by bots.

Then you go on to search for something, and find only results that are clearly AI generated pages and come to the conclusion that directly prompting some LLM is better than reading an AI slop page that's output by the same AI for slightly less specific prompt.

My concern is that this will only get worse over time - which is great for companies selling AI tokens and bad for society and whoever wants to interact with other humans over the internet.

reply
This would be expected. The corner cases people faced with PHP throughout the decades have been well documented on the internet for eons.

Swift, not so much. It's relatively new. Looking at AI's abilities like an engineer's career span scaled about 10-20x of time makes it make a bit more sense.

It's going to be worse at newer/niche things, intuitively - which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage outputted by other LLMs moving forward.

reply
Also, I suspect most "production" Swift –the type of stuff written by seasoned experts– (I just had to add em-dashes ;) is behind closed-source walls.
reply
No doubt in my mind, a future Apple model will be the best to use for this purpose. They likely have more swift to train on than anyone else, and would benefit directly from more quality apps, rather than the slop flowing into the App Store (>1k app submissions per hour; they claim)
reply
> which is only going to get worse as it "learns" from garbage outputted by other LLMs moving forward

You seem to assume that autoregressive pretraining (and unfiltered behavior cloning, maybe) are the only ways to improve LLM performance.

reply
Isn’t it because Swift (and SwiftUI, if you used that) changes the recommended approach to solving X every 18 months?
reply
That's just one way to use LLMs though. Recently on a flight I could not figure out how to connect my wife's earphones (i.e. put them in pairing mode) to my macbook since I was used to the old Airpods Pro case. So I asked Gemma4 26B A4B (offline, LM Studio) and was told to use the 'two tap on front of case' gesture, which worked. This situation would have been significantly more frustrating without (local) LLMs. I'm essentially carrying around a basic "how to" on everything, inaccurate though it may be, it's better than nothing.
reply
Absolutely. I use it often, for stuff I used to "just Google." Other than a predilection for giving me CLI walkthroughs, it is usually fine.
reply
My experience was different. I found it extremely good at fronting technology like react while I had to hand hold it for the backend tasks. Even with fable it was the same.
reply
Would you describe yourself as more skilled at frontend engineering or at backend engineering?
reply
Definitely frontend (it's what I do, every day, and I enjoy it), but I have a great deal of experience (over 25 years), writing some pretty robust backend stuff. I just don't enjoy it as much.
reply
I'm nowhere near that level of experience, although I've done both as well. I'm more backend oriented. And my experience has been the opposite. When I ask for backend code, footgun after footgun appears on my screen. With frontend code, much less of an issue, as far as I can tell. Part of me believes this is because I'm less skilled at frontend, and I don't bat an eye when the LLM plops down yet another useMemo (I've since learned that this is rarely needed). But in your case this argument can hardly be made. With 25 years I trust your ability to spot a good design on either end of the stack. So then I don't know where this discrepancy comes from. Maybe my prompting skills leave something to be desired.
reply
I don't do "megascale" backends, though. My code is generally smaller-scale stuff that's designed to be deployed on a wide variety of cheap hosting, and is pretty conservative. It doesn't "push the limits."

I'm unlikely to run into many of the problems that (for example) the PornHub developers hit, several times an hour.

In that case, I benefit from folks like you, that allow me to have solutions that scale down to my level.

reply
Well Apple just released a bunch of Agent Skills. I tried it on my macOS apps and I noticed some improvements codewise and updated some deprecations I didn’t know existed in Swift.
reply
Looking forward to that.
reply
Yeah it comes with Xcode 27
reply
In my experience the language has become irrelevant for me, I created a system like mix of revenuecat and firebase and I’m not even sure what language which part is. It has client side libraries that are swift and kotlin, the Identity management is Swift but the iAP/Subscription tracking is go IIRC. It’s all integrated somehow and works very well.
reply
That's the thing, the Swift works fine, but is incredibly brittle. I think it would collapse, at the first bump in the road.

That's fine, for a lot of corporate applications, but not for the stuff I write. I'm anal, I know, but that's how I roll.

reply
Which LLM though? Models can still be significantly different in their capabilities.
reply
That's likely. I generally use ChatGPT (latest), but as a chat interface (not an agent). I suspect that I might get better stuff from Claude (maybe).
reply
Might be because there are less Swift projects to train with.

But I've seen Claude write crazy code in Python and JavaScript, too

reply
My theory is that most of the Swift code in the public domain, is basically demo code. Short, idealized, code samples to demonstrate issues and solutions; much like you would see in StackOverflow.

PHP has huge, entire frameworks and systems, refined over years.

reply
There is also a lot of low quality PHP code out there, and a lot of legacy code in a language that I am told (I have not used if for years myself though) has changed a lot.
reply
Same with C++. You don't want to write C++, the way that I used to.

That's one of the things that I appreciate about the PHP that the LLM provides. It uses modern idioms that make better use of the modern language.

reply
I do not know about crazy, but certainly sub-optimal. For example a loop over DB query results instead of modifying the code to work with a single query.
reply
I found that asking it to refactor for performance and safety often addresses these issues.
reply
I’m going to guess you are better at frontend than backend.

The classic AI Gell-Mann effect.

reply
The guess is correct.

The diagnosis, however, is not.

Have a great day!

reply