FWIW – my day job is running a largish (28 people) Product and Design team for Cellebrite. Cellebrite has nothing to do with Espresso – though some of the offices do have decent machines. I’ve been leading product teams for over 20 years and that background is driving how I develop software with Claude. For new feature releases I batch several related features (and bugs) and build them into a sprint – the sprint happens in a single branch. Sprints are 1-3 hours – usually on a Sunday when things are quiet. For major features I use plan mode judiciously – I rarely single-shot anything. While I have no desire to look at code (actually one of my goals) – I do want to understand how the design (technical and UX) is evolving and what the underlying data model is. I also have a medium term roadmap of sorts – and when I’m in plan mode with Claude – I’m constantly reviewing decisions related to the current work that may impact things I need to do in the future. This week’s Sunday sprint was a good example of that.
What I actually wanted was a more convenient way to sync data across devices (iPad, iPhone) – currently there’s a hack in place to back up and restore data to iCloud – it works but it’s a temporary hack. To access iCloud APIs – the app needs access to iOS native APIs so what I ended up doing was pulling ahead with the native wrapper work. I’ve been avoiding this because It adds a whole lot of Yak shaving – setting up an Apple Developer subscription, installing XCode, wrapping the react app with Capacitor, not to mention potentially breaking the app. In the pre-agentic world this would’ve been months of prep and work – now it’s the kind of thing you can pull off on a Sunday evening while half watching TV with wifey. The first step was planning – the work that needs to be done, the risk and mitigations – a few tweaks to the plan and go. The major worry was breaking the barcode reader – one of my favorites – the mitigation was pretty much a rewrite of that code. While Claude was coding – I set up XCode and signed up for an Apple Developer account.
After some jangling around in XCode trying to figure out how to get the app on my phone (without having to go via the App Store – something for another day) and backtracking to get the app icons in the right place. That small magical icon appeared on my screen. My first iOS app !
Click – nothing. Well not nothing, but the rendering was broken – somehow the screen dimensions were not taken into account so the app was visible just zoomed in to a region of the canvas with nothing on it – quickly fixed and redeployed. Straight to the home screen – loaded my current config and data and looked like everything was working – except dark mode – what happened to dark mode ? Another debug session and quickly fixed and redeployed. From visual inspection – everything looked to be working – probably 90 minutes to wrap a reactive app with Capacitor and change to native calls.
The thing I actually wanted was iCloud synching – so I started a smaller sprint to get that working. I thought it would be smaller – a fair amount of debugging was required here and I’m starting to think Claude really isn’t quite expert level (yet) – it has the breadth maybe, depth I’m less sure. It took some debugging and some design iteration but we got there eventually. I don’t think an expert would make the kind of mistakes I experienced during this sprint and it’s disconcerting when Claude admits – “oh yeh, I should have realized that function would fail if we hadn’t initialized the XYZ first”. Early days I guess. At some point – I may run the repo against another coding agent and get a second opinion on some of the design choices.
So I now have a fully functioning iOS native app running on iPad and iPhone with iCloud synching across devices. I’ve also published the app through TestFlight so if you are interesting in trying it you can sign up here. Part of the publishing flow discovered that the 9Bar name was already taken so had to rename the app – that was a lot of changes. Next time Claude suggests a name – I’ll ask it to verify domain names, app stores, USPTO, etc. Trust but verify !The next significant enhancement is integration with the Half Decent Scale – this will be a real test for Claude – this involves controlling a remote device over BLE.
Rich Sharples' Weblog 