Member-only story
The Last UIKit Developer
A nostalgic requiem for an era that refuses to die. A critic of SwiftUI's incomplete state.
It’s 2030. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco, and across from me is Tim. He’s 45, graying at the temples, and he just told me he’s the last UIKit developer at his company. Not by choice, everyone else moved to Vibe Coded SwiftUI years ago. But someone has to maintain the legacy app.
The Day AI Came for Tim
Last week, Tim’s company ran an experiment. They fed their entire UIKit codebase into the latest AI model. “Convert this to SwiftUI,” they commanded. “Maintain all functionality.”
The AI churned for six hours. It produced 100,000 lines of SwiftUI code. It compiled. It even ran. For about ten seconds before crashing.
The AI had converted every UIViewController to a View. Every delegation pattern to a binding. Every UITableView to a List. It was technically correct, the best kind of correct. And it was completely, utterly broken.
