Mastodawn

'Codex in Xcode can probably take an entire ObjC project and convert it to Swift on its own'

Alright, bet.

I handed it the classic SameGame codebase, gave it my coding style markdown file, and said "So this is an old ObjC app for iOS. I would like you to completely convert it 1:1 to modern Swift, with the coding style in mind. Leave no ObjC behind"

No other prompts needed; I needed to update a few legacy things in the xcode project settings (min OS version, Swift version, etc), and got this:

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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 5

All automatic, not a line of ObjC remains. Deprecated APIs were all modernized. 5,400 lines of ObjC became 2900 lines of Swift 5

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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 5

I had long since rewritten the app myself in Swift, so this was only a contrived test of Xcode's new agentic programming support. But it did in 5 mins what took me months (years?) of on-again/off-again effort and preparation

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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 5

Nonetheless, if this is what you're up against, you have /absolutely no shot/ of convincing a brand new Xcode developer that they should spend weeks doing something the hard way ('because that's how I did it!') when the IDE will do it for you in the background before you've finished your coffee. This feels much more like the shift from assembly code, even punch cards, to programming languages. If you've kept within the Apple bubble up to now, this stuff is going to be a massive shock

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Steve Troughton-Smith Feb 5

Your only reprieve is that this stuff is so expensive right now. Codex at $20/mo is fine for tinkering, but you'd be forced into the $200/mo plan if you used this every day. Claude, which I've never used, also sounds way too expensive for my taste. If (and when) LLM-based agentic programming like this becomes free, gameover

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Kirk Reynolds

@stroughtonsmith I worked for AWS and having essentially unlimited access to Claude models really spoiled me last year. I dabbled with ObjC many moons ago, always wanted to learn Swift (I’m a web dev), but now? I know enough to review the code and have good tests but why bother writing by hand.