The true test here, which I don’t see much discussion around, isn’t how fast or how well agents can convert the existing apps to native; it’s how fast and how well the team can build entirely new features across platforms with native vs react. The existing app code is an unambiguous spec — perfect for agents to build from. Typical design specs, PRDs, and prompts have a lot more ambiguity. There’s a lot of iteration that needs to happen to get a feature from concept to launch and I’d wager that will not be as fast with the fully native approach.
The compile and build times on iOS (and Android) are also painfully slow. They claim to have "hot reloading" but only under very specific conditions, and it's not the whole app. When you're working with UI in particular, you can often edit and text your changes 10x faster on React than native. You could argue that the quality "gains" you get from native are partially negated by the reduction in iteration speed. Quality often comes from iteration and it's an order of magnitude faster with React.
Agreed, I’ve never used react native myself but I do use CapacitorJS to run JS (TS) apps and with a dev server I can hit save in my IDE and see it on my phone screen in <1 second on average. It’s so nice for iteration.
Throughout my career, I found that the faster I can go from wanting to try something to seeing it working, the better. Without that quick iteration cycle, I end up, not trying certain things or trying to batch all of my changes which then makes it harder to be sure what actually fixed it.
Exactly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Shopify ended up building some tooling to try to solve this, but Apple in particular is remarkably disinterested in or perhaps inept at improving the developer experience, and agents won’t magically fix that.
This is actually nonsense. More tokens means more capacity subscription and expense. Anthropic has enjoyed a high premium per million tokens because the quality per token was unusually high. Now it’s unusually low. This drives down the margin people will be willing to pay for the same number of tokens while driving up their capacity utilization. The economics are even worse for subscriptions.
Opus models have degraded rapidly since March, with each release being considerably less useful and considerably more verbose. The language is no so weirdly florid it’s difficult to understand, and its logical conclusions are almost always suspect. It goes off on clearly bizarre snipe hunts to the point it feels like I’m using a gpt 3 model at times. It’ll announce that it’s about to embark on building something then just return control to the user and wait. You can also tell perceptibly when they’re reducing model quality to load shed - it becomes stupider and stupider to the point you’re better off dumping state and switching to codex or just turning in for the day and hoping they secured more capacity tomorrow.
It’s an absolute race to the bottom with Anthropic on virtually every level. I’ve rarely seen a company so rapidly accumulate good will in the developer community as they did around 4.6 in December and January. By March, it was inconceivable to use anything else. 4.8 was a bit of a wake up call to not put all your harness eggs in one basket. 5 is straight up time to cancel territory.
I actually manually set my model back to the older versions to get anything serious done. More and more I use codex for anything non trivial.
This isn’t about avarice by the provide trying to get more tokens and more utilization. They’ve over subscribed for capacity as it is. If they can produce better quality for less tokens they can charge a higher margin and will be paid if, which is a better economic strategy overall. This is something else. I suspect it’s actually the opposite, they’re finding ways to cut capacity demand in ways that leads to worse behavior that leads to more capacity demands, worse output, worse quality, and worse margins, worse, worse, worse.
Just as I never saw a company accumulate such positive developer good will so fast, I’ve never seen one squander it so fast too.
