> It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem,

As much as I dislike it, I think that's the future of _all_ non-critical software (think social media, crms, CI, food delivery etc). Leadership in many companies is explicitly asking employees to have multiple agents running through the day and that will lead to this.

Read this for example: https://www.uber.com/in/en/blog/efficient-software-factory/ . A very useful system, I am sure. But when you have AI at every layer from code to review to triaging, rest assured AI is the only know who knows your system. And you better hope it's not telling you that something is load bearing during an incident.

> this yolo approach would give me constant dread.

When you’re completely ignorant, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

I wrote every single line of the react native app we ported, and maintained it for 9 years. So suffice to say, I'm familiar with the code.

But I am going to always prioritize the user experience over a developer (like myself)'s need for satisfaction to see code. And a pure native app is _always_ going to behave better than react native.

This gives me a chance to do that.

I answered elsewhere that I don’t personally use Android phones but we have people on our team that do. Which is why I don’t want to personally claim that it feels native.

But yes we are having real Android users test it.

So it’s quite the contrary. I care MORE what real users say. I can only guarantee that the app does things when I tap. So I’m not trusting the agent on UX, only on functionality. But whether it feels native, I am relying on those users in our team.

First “production is down” page means you just tell codex production is down and to fix it.

I work as a professional app developer. And I find this take to be naive.

Most of the time when I review code from AI, there is always something to improve.

It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it.

The maintenance is not only the burden on the human and LLM. With too many moving parts, it becomes harder and harder to build and verify the correctness of future features. Yes you can write test for this and that, but it didn’t need to exist in the first place.

The second problem is correctness issues. Especially the edge cases. You cannot just manually test out a race condition on a phone! Sometimes it happens! Sometimes it doesn’t! If it leads to a visible signal like a crash, then yes, you can try to reproduce it. But there are a lot of these that are “silent” and would just lead to bad experiences.

We already had a software quality crisis! And I think such views only exacerbate the situation! Quality matters!

And this is not an anti-AI stance. I vibe code personal projects where I don’t even look at the code. But when I use AI as a professional engineer, I act like a professional. Because these products do have an impact on people’s lives.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app.

Some people on the cybersecurity side are starting to cry....

Same result here just using plain Opus 4.8+. I had a web ap with a PWA approach. Now I have an iOS app written in Swift/SwiftUI and an Android app in Kotlin in the appstores. I do not know how to code a single line of Swift or Kotlin. You just test the app and iterate with the AI over it until it is stable and does what it should.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app.

OP says they don't have an android phone...

I am using Gemini as well as Opus on a somewhat small project in React Native and I can not imagine this thing being able to build the whole thing on its own without it being a dumbpster fire.

Can you share some details of how you work? What models? What harness?

Damn, we really gotta get rid of the vibe coders. Bad things are on the horizon if we keep encouraging these naive habits.

> You just install it on your phone and use the app.

That‘s how you check functionality but that’s not how you get the bugs in the code.

Of course it would. Supply and demand. Some companies would decide not to bother. Others would decide it was worthwhile. The limited pool of supply (app developers) would be distributed across demand.

> This is an incredibly boring task.

We all want super exciting jobs. But plenty have boring jobs like this. Between not having a job or having a boring job that pays well, the choice is obvious for many of us.

While I agree with that statement -- that is also a lot of jobs. We have a lot of humans -- not every single developer sits in the innovation seat. The fewer the jobs available the less employable humans.

I think that rewrite - if AI enabled - owes its thanks to the legion of individuals who put their code up on the internet in the first place.

Weird times.

Previous company I worked for would have (and did) hire dedicated swift/java mobile developers to build and maintain ios and android native versions (largely porting functionality from an existing web application)

Not anymore.

Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.

Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?

Definitely agree. Most developers could build a basic Twitter or Facebook clone. The hard part is getting the users, content, and relationships that make the product worth coming back to.

True, but shops are exposing everything to Claude or Open AI. It's akin to outsourcing all manufacturing to subcontractors in China. That was cheaper, but extremely short-sighted. Now so many products have cheap Chinese knock-offs that are nearly the same as the originals because the subcontractors made both.

I was surprised by your comments and then you do Rust to be called via Java or Kotlin and Swift?

What does your app do?