Seriously! What a bonkers thing to claim. "I had codex use maestro so I assume it made Android work well and idiomatically".
It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem, which makes me feel fear in my heart when I imagine the first "production is down" page coming in. I already hated mobile because it's so much harder to maintain than web (and I don't do any spyware or IAP so no benefits for me there); this yolo approach would give me constant dread.
It shows that at least some software development is moving away from code and to product management instead. I'm not passing judgement on that; I actually think that's great for a lot of software. It is interesting to see the shift happening though and will be fun to see if the general quality of software noticeably changes over the next few years.
> It's a fine project to do but clearly they put zero value on being familiar with the project's codebase/stack and ecosystem,
As much as I dislike it, I think that's the future of _all_ non-critical software (think social media, crms, CI, food delivery etc). Leadership in many companies is explicitly asking employees to have multiple agents running through the day and that will lead to this.
Read this for example: https://www.uber.com/in/en/blog/efficient-software-factory/ . A very useful system, I am sure. But when you have AI at every layer from code to review to triaging, rest assured AI is the only know who knows your system. And you better hope it's not telling you that something is load bearing during an incident.
I wrote every single line of the react native app we ported, and maintained it for 9 years. So suffice to say, I'm familiar with the code.
But I am going to always prioritize the user experience over a developer (like myself)'s need for satisfaction to see code. And a pure native app is _always_ going to behave better than react native.
> And a pure native app is _always_ going to behave better than react native.
Maybe iOS is better about consistency, but I've used enough horribly made Android apps that I would not expect one that's vibe coded to behave better than a professionally made react native version.
I answered elsewhere that I don’t personally use Android phones but we have people on our team that do. Which is why I don’t want to personally claim that it feels native.
But yes we are having real Android users test it.
So it’s quite the contrary. I care MORE what real users say. I can only guarantee that the app does things when I tap. So I’m not trusting the agent on UX, only on functionality. But whether it feels native, I am relying on those users in our team.
Presumably a sarcastic post, but this is actually going to be how things are done soon. I had a box that OOMed and needed to be rebooted every few weeks. It was a disaster recovery standby box so figuring out what was going on never rose to the top of my priority list. So I asked Claude to dig into it (proxying the commands it wanted to run through me) and in an hour it had diagnosed the problem, fixed it, and taught me a bunch about memory usage in our system on modern kernels.
Not sarcastic. I have a moderately successful app and I haven’t once looked at the code (though I am capable, so far atleast). The only time I open Xcode is if I have to modify signing certificates. I did set up a slack workflow with a “fix it” button that basically tells Codex to fix the issue, run comprehensive tests, manually UI test for that particular issue with computer use and then deploy it.
You just install it on your phone and use the app.
Maintainability concerns are entirely overblown by people who don't use agentic AI to develop large mobile apps, but anyway give their opinion as if they had that experience.
I put in a few hundred hours, and I reached the same conclusion as Shopify. With reviews from other models and then a manual QA pass the result is fully usable.
I work as a professional app developer. And I find this take to be naive.
Most of the time when I review code from AI, there is always something to improve.
It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it.
The maintenance is not only the burden on the human and LLM. With too many moving parts, it becomes harder and harder to build and verify the correctness of future features. Yes you can write test for this and that, but it didn’t need to exist in the first place.
The second problem is correctness issues. Especially the edge cases. You cannot just manually test out a race condition on a phone! Sometimes it happens! Sometimes it doesn’t! If it leads to a visible signal like a crash, then yes, you can try to reproduce it. But there are a lot of these that are “silent” and would just lead to bad experiences.
We already had a software quality crisis! And I think such views only exacerbate the situation! Quality matters!
And this is not an anti-AI stance. I vibe code personal projects where I don’t even look at the code. But when I use AI as a professional engineer, I act like a professional. Because these products do have an impact on people’s lives.
So you don't use agentic AI to develop a large mobile app and you think my take is naive?
I also used to work full time as a Android developer for five years, and I'm pretty sure I know better than you about the quality of my app that I work on everyday.
All true (and thanks for posting a concrete example rather than "LLMS suck"). But my take is that none of this is much different than before times when I had teams of developers creating applications. They would often make similar mistakes which I would either need to catch or which would flush out in the field. Where it seems that LLMs are not excellent is where the person driving it is also the senior domain expert so can immediately spot pitfalls. But typically using humans to develop software this was really not often the case. Those people get promoted so they're no longer cutting the code. Under that scenario (replacing subordinate humans) I find the current models are either on-par or somewhat better (specifically because the models can also act like a peer senior dev, discussing approach options etc).
Are there cybersecurity concerns in the frontend? I would have thought you have to assume the client is untrusted and only do security work on the backend
I have been getting these comments often here, including concerns about my non existent backend's security.
Last time, when I pointed out that the attack surface for mobile apps is typically very small, some users started to talk about zero day vulnerabilities in the OS's media handling, as if it was a concern for my app implementation.
You don’t believe how often people leave secrets in the app or use webviews and iframes badly, misconfigure OAuth in client side and so on. There are many issues where secure API does not help.
Same result here just using plain Opus 4.8+. I had a web ap with a PWA approach. Now I have an iOS app written in Swift/SwiftUI and an Android app in Kotlin in the appstores. I do not know how to code a single line of Swift or Kotlin. You just test the app and iterate with the AI over it until it is stable and does what it should.
No, they said they don't use android so don't know the native UX. You can test your app on the platform and confirm that the functionality all works, but how well it adheres to the platform's design language is subjective and hard to say if you aren't used to the platform.
I used the emulator - but just like I can use an iOS app for 30 seconds and tell you whether it feels native or not, I can't do the same for Android, since I'm not a daily user of Android phones.
And in the past, I didn't care because when I was manually building the app, I would just do my best with react native. But now that I can actually sweat the details (with the help of agents), I do want to hear from android users and use as many OS-native APIs and features.
Others on our team use Android phones. So when I said that we spent the next few days actually polishing it, that's where others came in, providing feedback when they used it.
I could only sweat the details on liquid glass, etc because I'm a daily iOS user.
I am using Gemini as well as Opus on a somewhat small project in React Native and I can not imagine this thing being able to build the whole thing on its own without it being a dumbpster fire.
Can you share some details of how you work? What models? What harness?
I use Codex and Claude Code desktop apps. I generally use only the SOTA, now Astra and Fable 5.1, Opus 5 when Fable runs out.
I don't know if Gemini is suitable.
I had few issues with my native iOS app, the results are just decent after a few iterations, the models do what I ask them to do. Where do you see the problem?
The LOC for my app is now at almost 200k + 110k lines of test code.
We have people on the team that are android users. I just meant that I don't want to evaluate whether it feels "native" as I personally am not an Android user.
Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.
Well same people had expected self-service restaurants, self-pay terminals will cause no tip. And even more fun future robotic servers can just work without expecting/asking for tips.
Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".
I don’t think the parent comment was trying to equate the two, but rather pushing the argument to its logical extreme to test show that the reasoning doesn’t hold consistently across cases. Whether they made a convincing argument is separate.
Taking it to a logical extreme is good practice for thinking from first principles, but always pair it up with going to the logical extreme in the other direction. That might look something like: "would you really eat at a restaurant owned by a habitual jaywalker?".
> HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) !
I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.
Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.
I hear you, and I know every project being dissed here is not going to be Dropbox. Perhaps some projects deserve the reality check they get. Though I still believe that HN crowd telling that just pay teachers more or kids need to be taught by good human teachers are underestimating the scale of the problem.
Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.
Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.
This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.
The Galileo gambit is the idea that because experts reject an idea, it must be true. HN is the furthest thing from experts when it comes to early childhood education.
-- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
I’m on the same boat. I get why people do it. Writing prose is significantly slower than consuming it, but there’s still a part of me that thinks “if you didn’t think writing was a good use of your time, why would reading this content be a use of mine”. I don’t mind AI-assisted writing but it’s hard to know to how much human editing was involved when the text shows so many AI tells. Almost by definition, AI writing is average it’s hard to justify spending the time when there’s so much content out there.
So tired of this false equivalence between left and right politics in the US. So because major LLMs support a increase in the minimum wage we need to offset it with an LLM that has spouted Nazi propaganda and lets you generate porn image of real people?
It really is that simple. “Users of company with a long track record of unethical behavior surprised at the company’s latest unethical business decision.”
I know it’s not easy for some to stop using their platform for some reason or another. That’s the point. When you use their product not because they are the best choice in a free market with options, but when you use it because you have to. Just don’t surprised when FB keeps pushing the limits.
Growing up, I’d wonder how people could work for companies like cigarette manufacturers even after it became well known that their products wreck havoc on your health.
This comment is a masterclass in the type of mental gymnastics people do to justify working for these kind of companies.
> Is the company toxic? where do you draw the line?
You couldn’t even answer the question you yourself posed.
Meta isn't nowhere near cigarettes manufacturers in terms of damage. Tobacco kills millions every year. Meta may need even more regulation, and you can argue that social medias aren't the greatest invention, but I don't think they are that bad.
There's no mental gymnastics here. I draw the line differently than you, that's all. I'm not a big fan of Meta and their products, I would be happy to work there anyway for the reasons I mentioned. But I wouldn't work for let say Marlboro.
I think one could make a hypothetical case that working at a cigarette company in 2026 is a more morally justifiable position than working at meta in 2026, because cigarettes as they're regulated today generally only affect adults, only affects those who opt in, and kills people on average near the end of their lives.
Meta's decisions affect everyone, even non-users, because of their outsized impact on society. But they also have way more users than cigarettes, and deliberately prey on children and teens in ways that could affect them their whole lives (see recent lawsuit).
I would struggle to judge anyone working for either of these companies. I think the blame lies at the top, or is shared by all of us for failing to build a better society which prevents such exploitation.
Measuring damage to society, or the degree of moral bankruptcy in a company's leadership, is a very difficult thing to quantify.
So, I agree with you that these are personal choices, and everyone will draw the line differently based on who they're comfortable working for and what they're comfortable contributing to.
Maybe not in the millions, but Meta is certainly not free from bloodshed. For example, in efforts to promote "engagement," they left the rollout of Facebook in Myanmar dangerously unmoderated, and (at least according to claims by Amnesty International[1]) are at least partially responsible for the genocide of the Rohingya there, which saw the tens of thousands of deaths.
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