August 24th, 2026

​Swift News - Video Version - Get my thoughts on the articles below.

​Critical Thinking & AI​

This is a great article about "cognitive surrender" when building with AI. I bet we've all dealth with that at one time or another. My favorite idea from this article is when Bruno talks about what value do you bring if all you do is pass along the result of the prompt? Because anyone can prompt now a days. Applying your critical thinking to the result is your value. Remember, it's AI ASSISTED development. Not AI DO EVERYTHING development.

​Bitrig: Build Native Swift Apps with AI​

Bitrig is an AI development environment specifically focused on building premium Swift apps for Apple platforms built by the co-creators of SwiftUI that were formally at Apple. Bitrig is constantly improving and updates are shipped weekly. We recently added the ability for Bitrig to handle App Store Connect for you as well as configure your backend with CloudKit or Supabase.

​What Kills Apps? It's Not Being Sherlocked.​

Getting Sherlocked isn’t the death sentence people think it is. Apple has to build features that work for EVERYONE, which leaves plenty of room for indie developers to go much deeper, and better, for a specific audience. I loved the phrase “built-in is not the same as built deep.” The article also covers what actually kills apps, and "shiny object syndrome" hit a little too close to home for me. AI makes starting something new so easy, but the success usually comes from sticking with one thing and obsessing over it for a very long time.

​SwiftUI Blend Modes​

I’ve seen .blendMode() in SwiftUI for years and never really knew what it did. This article is a great visual walkthrough of all 21 blend modes with practical examples like adding paper textures to images, gradients, color effects, and even filling an SF Symbol with an image. If you’re looking for some new ideas to make the design of your app a little more interesting, there’s a lot of cool stuff in here.

​Better Copy for Your Apps​

We’re developers. We’re usually pretty bad at writing the words that actually appear in our apps 😂. Apple had a WWDC session this year about writing better copy in our apps, and Jordan had an agent learn from that session and then review all the strings in his app. He said the results were fantastic. Whether you point your AI at this session and then at your codebase or you watch it yourself and update your strings yourself... this needs to happen one way or another.

​What is Context Rot?​

You’ve probably seen that little circular progress indicator indicator filling up next to your prompt in Claude Code, Codex, or Bitrig. You may know that's the context window filling up, but there’s more going on than I originally realized. This article (by me!) dives into what's really going on here and gives you some tips on how to deal with it so the performance of your LLM doesn't degrade over time.

Till next time,

Sean