I gave Codex a task to build a whole preferences window for a Mac app in a XIB, with NSTableView and a backing model saved to a file, +/- buttons and so on… I'm curious how far it can go on this 🫣

#MacDev

First test was replacing an existing window with an NSStatusBarItem w/ menu and a custom view made in code, and that worked surprisingly well. This could be something that will get me back into #iOSDev / #MacDev, if I can make the robot automate the boring/boilerplatey/complicated parts 🤔
Son of a bitch, not bad at all! (it saves & reloads from a file) - I had to do a few back-and-forth telling it to fix the saving, loading and button styles, but it's working now. This could work 👀
@mackuba If you teach it the modern HIG by @marioguzman and let it run in code and take screenshots in XCUITests on a VM from the get go, you'll be surprised how far it gets

@ctietze @mackuba but *please, for the love of God* tell me that you’ll read it too. Read. The. HIG. Docs.

I spend a *ridiculous* amount of time making these. That’s why I move so slow. But it doesn’t motivate me to continue if they’re just fed into some LLM…

If no one at least knows it to some degree, in 10 years, who will?

@marioguzman Can't speak for @mackuba but I'd buy the print edition, poster edition, whatever edition and read it to my daughter Fahrenheit 451 style to preserve an important part of humanity after the apocalypse. 📖

It's been such a great resource and point of discussion in teams already. Thank you!

Feeding the bots with it just removes the tedium from repeating the boilerplate.

@ctietze @mackuba Well thank you… 🙏

I’ve just been seeing at least what I have wrote to LLMs and it just makes me sad. What I hoped to see was people reading them and asking questions for discussion — not taking a shortcut, somehow applying it to their apps w/ LLMs, and then not benefiting personally (knowledge).

It was to carry knowledge forward. Everyone push the Mac forward. Not just immediate personal gain.

@marioguzman @ctietze @mackuba For what it’s worth I just used your HIG docs when adding a bottom status bar to one of my apps, honestly would have missed some of the text formatting without it. An invaluable guide these days

@marioguzman Yeah it's a weird time of carelessness in all things.

Reminds me of my pal Sascha at zettelkasten.de who got an email by a reader of his print book who wrote, essentially: "nice book; to read it on my tablet, I ripped and tore it apart to feed it through a scanner, worked quiet well"

That felt quite tone-deaf, to destroy the carefully crafted artifact