Daring FireballSwift 6 Productivity in the Sudden Age of LLM-Assisted Programming
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/swift-6-llms
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/swift-6-llms
Ilter Cengiz@daringfireball although I agree with the points related to Swift 6 and LLMs, even if one is using Swift 5, there is still a big gap of productivity when it comes to building apps for iOS and for Android (with Compose + Kotlin) Google is hugely helping their developers by making sure whatever next version of Android brings to be usable on devices and OS versions as old as 2019. This is the fact without LLMs even.
@daringfireball SwiftUI made it worse. Now we are stuck with a bug that is fixed on iOS 18, but we still support 16 for example. If this was on Android, all we had to do was to bump the Compose version we are using and ship an update. I’m experiencing this first hand myself as a decade plus iOS app developer and the fact that Apple is this much behind when it comes to developer experience is shameful to say the least.
Sören@ilter @daringfireball I would imagine
• Swift being AOT-only (vs. Kotlin being JIT), leading to a much slower edit, compile, debug cycle
• no Hot Reload support for UIKit nor for SwiftUI (which does at least offer previews), leading to more *frequent* edit, compile, debug cycles
play a bigger role here; use of LLMs is just a cherry on top (spicy autocomplete).
Oh, and Apple’s docs being notoriously poor.