Jacob

Vacation with kids and land is a lot of work, but I'll have a beer with my Homie-steaders anyway

We use staging environments and clones for a reason. Be more principled and intentional in your processes and treat the AI like a junior contractor who gives Zero F's about your business. You'll be better off for it.

Should not be a hot take—but probably is…

If you used an agentic ai on a production instance of a database and it dropped tables or otherwise deleted data, you should be more ashamed and less angry.

Big news! I'm joining @joshdholtz and @RevenueCat on the Monetization team!

Fired up!!

🔥☝️

What I've learned about AI as a pair programmer is that it rabbit trails worse than a developer with ADD. It does well if you don't muddy the water with too many details about goals or "why" something should happened. Just that it should do x and you'd like to use y apis.

Fear point 😅 I'll give that a go!

I've used web chats to date. I really got interested in agentic features after using Amazon Q recently to configure the stack for a side project. So now I'm just trying to figure out how to keep the AI from going off on tangents and to not hallucinate.

Have you used your Anthropic key with Xcode 26 yet?

Or how would you recommend an AI Newbie to get started working with Claude for Apple development?

Thanks!

I've been opposed to "vibe coding" to date, but I'll be honest… I wasn't aware of the rails we could put the AI on to get more reliable output.

So now I feel a bit behind.

Who's willing to give me some pointed resources to catch me up on how to use AI as a pair programmer and to move faster?

The vibe coder with some technical ability is the spoon. Far more effective than the layman.

But the ladle, that's the Staff + engineer who knows when to ask AI for something instead of vibing. It's the right tool at the right time, instead of some tool all the time.

The vibe coder with no understanding of the space is the fork. You can get some syrup in your mouth and it tastes great, so you keep dipping your fork and moving along. Eventually you realize that it's not working so well.

Fork-fulls of syrup. That's what my daughter just said—quite excitedly—at breakfast.

It's funny where my brain goes when my kids say things. At first I thought of our striving in general and the book of Ecclesiastes.

Then I got to thinking about AI and Vibe Coding.

Harlan, it was great to meet you at Deep Dish. Oh, and… this talk was 🤌

Photo Processing Architecture Photo Processing Architecture. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Setting up some infrastructure for a small side project that will handle some image processing. Any AWS pros care to look at this diagram and tell me if I'm doing anything dumb?

gist.github.com/JZDesign/11d...

GitHub - JZDesign/Validation: Gather feedback on feature ideas so you can spend time working on what users actually want. Gather feedback on feature ideas so you can spend time working on what users actually want. - GitHub - JZDesign/Validation: Gather feedback on feature ideas so you can spend time working on what u...

Check it out.

github.com/JZDesign/Val...

But I'll add a subscription tier later this year so you don't have to. You can just use the dashboard and admin tools I'll write to do it all. Just plug and play.

I'll also add android and web UI components at a later date as well. (Though you're welcome to help out!)

So I'm starting an open source UIaaS library (iOS for now) to make it easy to gather user feedback on ideas BEFORE you start developing them.

One thing I've become acutely aware of over the years is… I assume people are like me. So do (most of) you. And because of that creators of all kinds often think that people will like or use the things they create.

Turns out, this is usually way wrong. 😅

Thanks! I'm looking forward to it!

This is going to be fun! See you there?

My LLM codegen workflow atm A detailed walkthrough of my current workflow for using LLms to build software, from brainstorming through planning and execution.

I read an article recently on how to use an LLM to flesh out an app idea. I'm not an AI user in my day-to-day, but this has been a blast so far. In the article, he said it should take 15 minutes, but I suppose my app idea is too complicated, because it's been days 😅

harper.blog/2025/02/16/m...

Never Miss a Localized String Value Again | Jacob Zivan Design Managing localized strings can be difficult. But, there are some tools on how to manage localized strings in iOS to make sure we don't royally mess things up. In this article, we'll cover how to utili...

Testing if my site's metadata is ready for BSKY

jacobzivandesign.com/technology/n...

🔥☝️

Hey! After 7 years away from all social media—I don't count linkedIn—I'm back online and ready to chat about the Swift language.