Fable built me a new app over the weekend. It took a few hours of iteration, mostly because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted well enough to specify it up front.
Aside from some minor CloudKit Sync issues, and some stuff you have to do in Apple Developer UIs, I did nothing except chat and everything just worked on the first try. I did read the code for quality/security stuff and it’s very reasonable.
This is a jump from the last app I wrote with AI. These things continue to get better. Unlike the last time, Fable proactively launched the simulator and inspected the UI through screenshots. It built scripts to generate sample data for UI iteration from real data I had on disk. It read existing CI pipelines to figure out how the data was generated and found a minimal, no-fuss way to fit a step into an existing pipeline to generate a version of the data that this app could use. Even just 6 months ago, I would have had to do so much of this myself.
I’ve spent this year genuinely believing this is the direction that software development is moving, but it’s wild to see it in practice.
(The app is something I won’t publish beyond private TestFlight; it compiles a reading list for me and gives me a native view of some data from a daily report I generate for myself from a series of CI pipelines that run overnight. A new CI step emits as JSON the same data that powers a web dashboard for me. Now I can read my morning briefing from my iPhone or iPad, and read state syncs between both.)
