kylemacomber
kylemacomber on Hacker News
Apple has relaxed the guidelines for developer tools compared to the early days of the App Store. If you look today there are Python IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and various other apps that execute user generated code. The key guideline to be mindful of is 2.5.2.
Totally! I have the same use case when I’m, say, at the park supervising my kids.
You can export your entire project as a single swift file from the share sheet. This makes it pretty straightforward to import the code into an Xcode project when you’re back at your Mac
One clarification: we did not rebuild any of the frameworks. As quickly as possible, the interpreter calls out to the compiled frameworks in the OS. So Bitrig is calling into the real SwiftUI, the real Foundation, the real MapKit, etc.
This isn't exhaustive, but quickly top of my head:
- How to Win Friends and Influence People — This was really eye opening to me and helped me more productively engage in a large organization like Apple.
- Sam Harris's podcast — I'm always interested to hear his takes on the controversial topics of the day as well as more philosophical and philanthropic ones.
- The Knowledge Project podcast — I don't listen to this as much anymore but a few years ago I was a regular listener.
- Simon Willison’s blog — The highest signal to noise way I've found to stay up to date with developments in AI.
Wow that's really high praise. Thank you.
There's a lot I want to do to improve the prompting experience. As I mentioned in the original post, it's very simple right now.
There's a lot of inspiration we could (and probably will) draw from other products (e.g. Cline's Plan vs Act modes) to build what you're describing.
It can also be really fun and productive to just rapidly iterate on what the AI gives back, without having to take the time to describe it all up front. Sometimes this approach can lead to a new directions you might not have thought of.
Don't tell anyone, but once you're on the paid plan we're not actually enforcing the 100 message limit right now ;)
We're still in the learning phase, and are going to adjust the plans based on exactly the kind of considerations you're raising
Ya, I agree it makes sense for us to record a more tutorial length demo at this point and we can show off things like that.
Thanks for the tip about the mic. Fun fact: it's me in the video, but it's Jacob doing the narration :P
Thanks for the heads up. I confess, I did not test it on an SE. We'll take a look!
Cool, that's really helpful context. We'll take a look at the code editing experience in those apps for inspiration.
You can edit the code directly in Bitrig, but we haven't optimized the experience around that.
Are you imagining you'd be editing the code with the software keyboard or a paired hardware keyboard?
Styling apps is an area we're excited to spend time exploring. Today in our system prompt we say "ALWAYS make the design Apple-like. Use clean typography and consistent padding/spacing." However, tbh it's not something we carefully tested.
For the most part, I think the look and feel of the apps benefits from SwiftUI baking Apple's design system into the defaults so heavily.
Heh... it definitely wasn't an overnight approval. However, Apple has relaxed the guidelines for developer tools compared to the early days of the App Store. If you look today there are Python IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and various other apps that execute user generated code. The key guideline to be mindful of is 2.5.2.
On a personal note, I wanted to thank the HN community. I’ve been reading HN since college (for over 15 years now!) and it’s been formative in my development as a software engineer and leader.
I don’t pipe up very often, but I visit HN almost every day. Many of the books I read, blogs I frequent, and podcasts I listen to, I found via HN. I think it’s fair to say, if it weren’t for HN, that Bitrig wouldn’t be Bitrig and SwiftUI wouldn’t be SwiftUI.
Posted by
kylemacomber on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @11:39AM
from the self-post dept.
Hi HN, we’re Kyle, Jacob, and Tim. We’re building Bitrig (https://www.bitrig.app).Bitrig lets you create native Swift apps for your phone, on your phone, just by chatting with AI. It’s like Lovable for iPhone apps.Here's a video of Bitrig in action:
https://youtu.be/CUlWhF3ERMEWe created SwiftUI at Apple to help developers make better apps with less code. Bitrig lets anyone build at this level...
I’m one of the engineers that spearheaded this initiative inside of Apple. I just wanted to thank the HN community—I’ve been reading HN for 10 years now and it’s been formative in my development as a software engineer.
If you’re at WWDC stop by the labs and say hi!
This is my first comment on HN. Until now I have been satisfied just observing. However this post was so well done that I felt obligated to create an account to leave some form of positive feedback.
I found this post an intense, enlightening, and thoroughly enjoyable read.