Empower Apps

Stewart Lynch stops by to chat about using AI to learn faster instead of just letting it write your code. We get into planning in stages before you build, why Markdown is the universal language of AI, and the tiny "donkey work" tools he vibe codes for himself.

Guest
Related Links
Related Episodes
Chapters
  • (00:00) - Xcode 27 & the New Device Hub
  • (03:36) - Why YouTube Teaching Is Changing & Using AI to Synthesize New APIs
  • (11:24) - Why Learn When AI Can Build It? Staged Plans & PRDs
  • (16:29) - Markdown as the Universal Language of AI
  • (22:07) - AI Costs, Hallucinations & Learning Smarter
  • (27:48) - Xcode + Claude Code Workflow
  • (30:53) - "Donkey Work": Building Small Tools With AI
  • (35:55) - What to Delegate to AI vs. Control Yourself
  • (40:22) - OS 27 Support, the iPhone Dual & Side-Project Playgrounds

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Music from https://filmmusic.io "Blippy Trance" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Creators and Guests

Host
Leo Dion
Swift developer for Apple devices and more; Founder of BrightDigit; husband and father of 6 adorable kids
Guest
StewartLynch
Focussed on iOS development and helping others improve their coding skills.All Social Links: https://t.co/d046J5k2jb

What is Empower Apps?

An exploration of Apple business news and technology. We talk about how businesses can use new technology to empower their business and employees, from Leo Dion, founder of BrightDigit.

Leo Dion (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of Empower Apps. I'm your host, Leo Dion. Today I'm joined with Stewart Lynch. Stewart, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Stewart (00:10)
Yeah, thanks for having me back on.

Leo Dion (00:12)
for people who don't know your prolific work on YouTube regarding software development, I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourself.

Stewart (00:21)
yeah. yeah, my name's Stewart Lynch. I I've been at coding for a long time, over fifty years. but only in iOS development since I guess twenty fourteen with the introduction of Swift. And then when SwiftUI came around in twenty nineteen, I decided to create a a YouTube channel. And so that's what I've been doing more or less for the last

Stewart (00:44)
six or so seven years is is creating videos to try and help others explore code, learn new APIs and yeah just become better Swift, SwiftUI coders. And I've also sort of resurrected a a blog, so I do a blog post every couple of weeks as well.

Leo Dion (01:01)
So before we begin talking about our primary talk at topic, I know you've recently done a video on it and it's just been released, but Xcode 27, what's been your thoughts of it so far and especially the new Device Hub?

Stewart (01:20)
Yeah, I know Device Hub has has gotten a fair bit of not a bad press, but I love it, specifically for for one feature in particular, and that's the really easy ability to replace a container. And for example, I've been just in trying to update my my latest app to work with with the iPhone Duo. And I've got a lot of of of sample

Stewart (01:44)
links, it's called My Links. It's got a lot of sample links. And I want to make sure that it's going to look good on every iPhone, every iPad, and so on. And I want to see exactly the same information on all of those devices. And it is so easy to just to save a container off my my iPhone, because that's where I've been building it directly anyway. And load that directly into any simulator and just have it work. And it's it's fantastic. It's just

Stewart (02:12)
greatly improves the the workflow there, for sure.

Leo Dion (02:14)
What what are y when you said bad press, what are you talking about specifically?

Stewart (02:18)
people have talked about how they well they they said that they haven't you know, there there are some things that are missing, although there are some some commands that you can say like for example, out of the box there's no command shift A to Swift to to switch to dark mode. All you have to do is just do an xcode-select command and and that'll enable those shortcut commands and and you're you're good to go.

Leo Dion (02:41)
Yeah.

Stewart (02:42)
but but there's others that have just haven't been happy with it. Yeah, and I don't think they've been so

Stewart (02:47)
specific as the fact that it's just different and change

Leo Dion (02:51)
Right.

Stewart (02:51)
is tough.

Stewart (02:52)
But I I really like

Leo Dion (02:53)
I mean

Stewart (02:53)
it. I d I think having having all those devices and simulators on that left hand column, being able to have it all right in front of you without having to figure out which toolbar to to tap or press, it's I think it's wonderful.

Leo Dion (03:06)
Yeah, no, I agree. I actually like the redesign. I have not deep dive deep dived into it enough. Been doing a lot of on device development, but there's there's been a few niceties, especially when it comes to the Apple Watch, that I've really liked about it. And I'm glad they've redesigned it in such a way. So yeah, I'm all yeah, they could add a few of those missing features eventually, but I'm happy with the redesign.

Stewart (03:30)
Yeah, it's and it's been stable more or less for me, so yeah.

Leo Dion (03:36)
so let's get into the topic for today. and you have a fairly unique one you wanted to talk about, which I really love. you we obviously have to do our an episode on AI, we're we're obligated to. we've already had a few really great guests on to talk about AI, but you have a unique perspective. correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been in you were in education for almost forty years, is that correct?

Stewart (04:02)
well I was in the education sector for thirty two years. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Dion (04:06)
thirty-two. Okay.

Leo Dion (04:08)
And we won't get into education and AI necessarily, but you did want to talk about how to use AI to to help you learn so that you can become more independent. And I think this is a great topic for everyone, including software developers. I'll I'll let you start it off by explaining exactly what you mean by that.

Stewart (04:31)
Yeah,

Stewart (04:32)
You know, what what I've been maybe I can just take a little bit of a sidetrack here because it's kind of all related. The the whole YouTube creator area is is is falling apart more or less. There are very there are fewer and fewer people creating content. And and that's because people are just are doing so much vibe coding. And without really understanding what it is that they're doing. And

Stewart (04:58)
So you know, my subscribers have gone from you know, five hundred a month down to sixty a month in new subscribers and so it's just been it's been brutal. View counts are up, but that's just because they've changed the way that they count views now. I mean I I I you know, I'm getting a thousand views in my first day of my new videos. That means absolutely nothing compared to the way it was because now as soon as you just tap a link, you're getting a view count where before that had to be something significant in order to count. So

Stewart (05:26)
It's really difficult to know whether or not people are are watching my videos. But and it but the ones that that tend to get a lot of of of of of views right now are ones that are are on the new content, the new stuff that has been released since WWDC. And so you know, I I I gotta think what you know, what's what's the reason behind people watching those videos as opposed to others? Whereas a lot of my videos have what are what are I call long tails.

Stewart (05:53)
They may not get a lot of views initially, but over a period of time they become discoverable as people need to find out something about a particular topic, then they then they'll start to watch it. But these recent videos are it's the topics are new and people are are are wanting to to view them. But who's viewing those? are those people who are experienced developers or are they new coders? And I suspect that they are mostly people who are experienced developers now who are just

Stewart (06:19)
behind the eight ball and and want to try and get a quick overview on what's new about some some particular topic. So, you know, it's it's sort of led me to go down the path of thinking about, you know, so what am I going to be doing in the future with respect to my YouTube content? And and how do I plan for that content? And and AI has has really changed my whole workflow over the past year.

Stewart (06:46)
there are lots of people creating content out there that are are mostly blog posts. There's the Apple documentation, there's the Apple videos that they that they produce on the developer developer site. So there's lots of information out there, but how do you synthesize that information into something that that you can actually learn either yourself or for me, the case is how can I take all that information that everybody has to produce something.

Stewart (07:13)
in a snapshot of twenty or thirty minutes will be valuable to the audience that I have. And so because it's all new, you're you're gonna be making mistakes and people are are are going to be offering different viewpoints. So what I I have to do now is to try and take all that information. And that's why when when WWDC is released, I am never the first one out of the gate to produce content. I wait until everybody else does it and then I and and I learn off of everybody else. And and I

Stewart (07:42)
you've been pretty open about this. I hardly ever have an original thought myself. It's always taking what somebody else has done and then reframe it into another way of of teaching. Because there's th there's no way that one person can ever express a concept that everybody's gonna be able to learn from their one particular document. So I'm just another cog in that whole machine. So what I've been getting AI to do now is that when I'm preparing a video

Stewart (08:12)
What I'll do is I'll gather every single source of information that I can get out there. And I'll get AI to read all of that and to synthesize it for me. And then I'll have an idea in my mind as to what it is that I want to be able to get across. And and most times it has to be relevant to people. If it's technical, which a lot of these blog posts are, they're they're sort of taken out of context. So the best way to learn is to try and

Stewart (08:39)
And have a sample app that in the end people can say, Yes, I can see how that might fit into my application. So as I'm creating a a new video, what I'll do is I'll tell it to get all this information, but start from before that information was viable. So create for me a sample app that doesn't use any of this information and

Stewart (09:05)
In the end, what I want is to have an application that is going to implement all of these different concepts so that I'm going to go from a start to an end and be able to teach the different concepts step by step. So the next one that I'm going to be doing is is on the iPhone Duo. You know, I'm going to take an application that is I'll I'll I'll describe the application that I want. So it's gonna have toolbars, tab bars, navigation.

Stewart (09:32)
And show that it was originally just an iPhone only portrait mode application, which an awful lot of people have. And now when it gets displayed on the iPhone Duo, it's gonna look ugly because it's gonna have these black bars along the outside as soon as somebody opens up the phone, right? So how how are and I think this is really important. People are gonna have to be able to move their apps along because this I think the iPhone Duo is going to really take off. I think it's gonna be something despite the price.

Stewart (10:02)
I'm I can't afford one, but despite the price, I think it's something that people are just going to get. And I think the price

Leo Dion (10:05)
Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Stewart (10:07)
will drop. so if your app isn't going to fit within that open framework, it's going to be dismissed and and you're just not going to be able to continue with it. So I think it's going to be really critical for people to understand that whole new paradigm and making sure that their apps fit on all devices. And so by using AI and creating a tool that's going to allow me to take

Stewart (10:30)
one of those individual apps and be able to get an end product that implements as many possible of those concepts about overflow and priorities for buttons and things like that and the vertical and the horizontal. I think that that would be something that will be valuable that will stand the test of time. But in doing so, anybody can actually do that. Anybody can go on AI and grab that information. And by getting it to synthesize and explain things to you and

Stewart (10:59)
Do a repetitive QA with the AI, you can get a much better understanding. And yeah, that that's kind of the approach that that I'm taking in terms of getting myself more familiar with the new topics, but also be able to put something together that I can then in my own way explain it to others so that they can learn without having to do that whole process. Does that make sense?

Leo Dion (11:21)
So

Leo Dion (11:22)
makes a hundred percent sense. I'm gonna be devil's advocate. I disagree with this, but I I I just want your your input. why why bother to learn anything when AI can just do it for us? I mean there's people who now just have, you know, Claude Code or whatever, build the code and then just be like

Leo Dion (11:44)
Okay, good enough. I don't have to review a PR, I don't have to whatever works, good enough for me.

Stewart (11:50)
Yeah, I I know, I I and I feel the same way. Sometimes I get really ticked off that I hear people, podcasters perhaps, I don't want to mention any names, who come out with these apps and they don't have a clue about coding. And because they have this huge audience of people who listen to them, they're hitting the app stores featured apps. The trouble is, if you don't know what you don't know, how can you tell Claude Code?

Stewart (12:18)
what to do. And I think that that's that's absolutely critical. The more that you know as a developer, the better you can use Claude or Codex to create the app that is going to take full advantage of all of the features and everything that that's available to you with the APIs. Because if you just try to describe an application, Claude or Codex is going to go off and do whatever they think is the best thing to do. But

Stewart (12:45)
If you can be more directive in your in your in your questions or your comments to those large language models, then you're gonna get a solution that is gonna be far superior, in my opinion, than anything that anybody who just vibe codes can do. Sorry.

Leo Dion (13:01)
No, that's okay.

Stewart (13:03)
Okay. Anyway,

Leo Dion (13:06)
so yeah, I I agree with you. you know, we were talking before the podcast about this anthropic study, about how the people who have more knowledge in that space, expertise in that space, they get more value out of their prompts, etc. because they know what they're talking about and and

Leo Dion (13:28)
It's gonna like I think we've said this, I c I could beat a dead horse, but this stuff is not gonna stay as cheap as it is. And so we're all gonna at some point have to be a little bit more mindful of how much how many tokens we use. So do you have specific prompts or skills that you use so you can be like they ask essentially why did you do this?

Stewart (13:53)
I don't have anything specific because it'll it'll all be depending on on on what the situation is. I never do a one time build this app for me. what I spend an awful I I spend an

Leo Dion (14:06)
Yeah, that's nuts.

Stewart (14:09)
awful lot of time creating a document that is very specific and then I'll always ask it to stage or to create a plan for me and give that plan to me.

Stewart (14:22)
So that I can take it, I can review it, and then I will review that plan and then go back and forth with it until I have a stage plan that I think is going to work to get the the the product that I want. And then I'll tell it to, okay, to implement each stage of the plan, but at the end of each plan, because I don't, you know, I am not a a a fantastic developer. I don't use test suites. I test everything manually, you know.

Stewart (14:49)
Take it for what it is. That's just what I what I do. And I'm too old to the change. So I just tell Claude to tell me exactly what do I have to do at the end of one of these stages to make sure that what you did is what I've asked. And if it doesn't, then I'll continue on with that stage until I have it exactly what I want. And that and by doing so, it may change future stages. So then I'll tell it, okay, now that we've made these decisions, let's go back again and let's revise that whole plan.

Stewart (15:20)
before I go on to the next stage. So I'll iterate through that one step at a time until I get a product at the end. So it's not a fixed document, but in the end it's fluid. And I also tell it to at the same time, every time you've updated this document, to save it in the root of the project as a markdown file. So that I always have a reference that I'll be able to go back to and you know I have an agents file that gives me the tells it to do the

Stewart (15:48)
the architecture and so on and so forth. But I think having a history outside of whatever LLM you're using that you can always go back to and refer to and and and go back in, it's it's a really useful thing to have.

Leo Dion (16:02)
think we're a lot on the same page. So yeah, like essentially what you're talking about is creating some sort of PRD document and then reviewing it. Like I I set up a PR and I essentially review the PRD before I move forward with the plan. And then it'll create GitHub issues and it'll create a PR with an actual test plan for me to test stuff out. So yeah, I'm in the same boat. what it one the things

Leo Dion (16:29)
you've talked about and you even did a recent video on it, but markdown and how I've said one of the good things about AI is now documentation is better than is better than and more important than it's ever been and it's essential part of the process. but you did a whole video on Markdown and how important it is now for AI. You wanna talk about that in more detail?

Stewart (16:54)
It's it's just that that all you know it everything that that an AI produces is markdown. so if you're going to give it information to synthesize to produce, it should be in Markdown. And even Apple has recognized that. You can just change the the URLs of their is their their their help documents to .md and it'll produce it as markdown.

Leo Dion (17:20)
Really?

Stewart (17:22)
There was something okay, don't quote me on this one. I actually th there I haven't even it was just something that I saw last week. That the if you just change the last to it just to .md on some of the Apple content, it now changes the markdown. I think Paul Hudson just posted about that not too long ago. So Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Dion (17:43)
Yeah, if you find that we'll post a link to that. My my

Leo Dion (17:46)
my recollection was I had to use the Sosumi.ai

Stewart (17:50)
okay.

Leo Dion (17:51)
and an MCP server there to do that. But if there's a way to do it now on developer.apple dot com, that would be amazing.

Stewart (17:59)
Yeah, well we'll have to test that out. But anyway, it's going that way. If it's not there now, it's it's likely going to go that way. So everything

Leo Dion (18:05)
Yeah, for sure. And I know there's

Leo Dion (18:08)
work like with Doxy to make that more easily

Stewart (18:10)
Yeah.

Leo Dion (18:10)
available.

Stewart (18:12)
I mean everything I do is is markdown. I don't use a word processor. everything I type is in markdown. I'm not a great markdown person in terms of of using the tags. I use this this app called Typora that allows me to just to type using command keys to get my different headings and and

Leo Dion (18:31)
Okay.

Stewart (18:32)
code blocks and things like that. But it produces markdown, but I never I'm never reading markdown.

Stewart (18:37)
I'm reading a lovely formatted file. And I yeah, I I did a whole video on on Typora as well. And it's it's

Leo Dion (18:44)
Okay.

Stewart (18:44)
a one it's a one-time cost. It's you know, it's it's not expensive at all, but I don't think there's anything better than that. If you want an all-purpose word processor that that that will also export to any other kind of format you want, including HTML, .doc or .docx and all all of the different formats, PDF.

Stewart (19:05)
So yeah, i i it it's great. So I'm a supporter of Markdown simply because that's your universal language now. And and I think whether you understand it or not, if you can get yourself a good editor, it's great. And now that Xcode presents Markdown exactly as Markdown as should look without the tags, hey, it's fantastic. Right?

Leo Dion (19:27)
Yeah, one hundred

Leo Dion (19:28)
percent. yeah, and I like markdown. I use so I use bear and visual studio code mostly. Visual Studio Code is really nice because it'll give you the GitHub format of how it'll look on GitHub if you need to know.

Stewart (19:43)
Well so

Stewart (19:43)
yeah, Typora has a template for that too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And but

Leo Dion (19:46)
that's awesome. Okay, well I'll definitely check that out. Go ahead.

Stewart (19:51)
sorry, just to the same just in terms of my whole my my I I had I you know I I vibe coded the tool to build my own website. And I was tired of of I mean I started with WordPress years ago and then I was did I had some other tool, RapidWeaver or something it was called.

Leo Dion (20:11)
Okay.

Stewart (20:11)
That it was a set application, set app gave it up and then I was gonna have to pay and I thought, can't be bothered with that. so I decided that, you know, my website has iterated over the years, but I wanted something just very specific to my to to what I do. So I built this this tool that basically generates the content exactly as I wanted. So the same process as I do to build any app, I created a document and went through it.

Stewart (20:38)
And I keep iterating on that, but one of the things that I wanted to do is to make sure that I could have my my blogs up there and I write my blogs in Markdown and I wanted that to be able to be rendered as HTML on the website. So basically I had it vibe coded to not only take my my my blog, but also allow me to do things with code so that I could if I'm doing a blog about code where I'm presenting code.

Stewart (21:06)
And then the next step is the same code with maybe something slightly added in the middle. I can actually have the previous code dimmed out and only the new code in there in bold. So you

Leo Dion (21:16)
Okay.

Stewart (21:17)
know that's that's custom. It's not markdown, it's it's custom. So by having AI take standard markdown with me and my own custom tags, I can generate my own special markdown that can then get rendered by AI into HTML for my website.

Leo Dion (21:35)
That's awesome.

Stewart (21:36)
You

Stewart (21:36)
know, I would never have been able to do that.

Leo Dion (21:39)
How what did you use to build the HTML?

Stewart (21:42)
I don't know. It's done through the vibe code. I don't know. Right? It's all done through the app, right? It just spits

Leo Dion (21:45)
okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. I got it, got it, okay.

Stewart (21:49)
it out. and then and then I and then I have so then it just saves it locally so I can view it locally. Then I have then I had it build an rsync tool into it so that it would then just synchronize back with the where I'm hosting it right now in GoDaddy.

Leo Dion (22:05)
got it. Okay. Cool. I wanna take deep dive a little bit more into learning and AI. what's like some of the challenges we're gonna be facing, you think, when it comes to learning, teaching, education, and AI? 'Cause there's definitely a lot of a lot of content out there or noise or whatever you want to call it about about how it's made it harder.

Leo Dion (22:30)
and it's made it harder for us to want to learn in general.

Stewart (22:36)
Yeah, I mean there's two sides to that question. You got the instructor to use AI to create their their lessons and and be able to get content across like like I do. And then there's the learner themselves using AI. And you already referenced this in in the the cost of those tools is just going to to go up. So in fact I've I've found I've I don't know what you do do you use Codex or Claude? Which one do you use?

Leo Dion (23:03)
Claude Code, terminal or cursor agent terminal. I'm a big terminal person, so

Stewart (23:07)
Okay. Yeah.

Stewart (23:10)
Okay. All right. So I mean I was using Claude Code. Then I moved over to Codex because other people were doing it. So I have just the the low level pro account on on both of those. It was just $20 US for both. Codex was working great up until about two weeks ago when the tokens started to get consumed so fast that within about an hour of doing virtually nothing.

Stewart (23:37)
I had ran out of tokens and had to wait for that five hour limit. So I've switched back to Claude and it seems to be okay now, but I think it's just a matter of time before we're all gonna get hit with that cost if you're gonna be heavy users of of AI to try and do what you have been used to doing. So what we're doing is we're getting sucked in right now into the the benefits of AI until it's all gonna hit us and it's gonna just become astronomically expensive.

Stewart (24:05)
And it's going to rule out an awful lot of people. So I don't have an answer for that. It's just a an observation that I've had that is is starting to bother me right now. Okay, I'm okay for now, but the more you become dependent on that, the the less valuable or the the the the more it's gonna be more expensive. So that sort of goes back to the the fact of that you better not take everything for granted, you better study what it offers you.

Stewart (24:31)
So that you can become more efficient in your prompts going forward, so that you can reduce the number of tokens that are going to be required to get the results that you want. So, you know, as a as an instructor, I think that's that's important to to understand that you've got to not just turn it loose and say, do this for me, but evaluate what comes back. And of course, that all comes back to what comes back, how real is that? Because and and

Stewart (24:57)
I d I don't know you, but I I have often have arguments with with Claude when I'm coding because I'll tell it that no, that's not right. That I know it's not right because I've done little snippets of projects that have used that code, yet it's

Leo Dion (25:12)
Right, right.

Stewart (25:12)
telling me, no, this is a mistake. It must be a bug in in Xcode, and then I'll produce a sample that shows that it's not a bug, and they'll say, yes, you're right. And then so now I'm teaching it, right?

Leo Dion (25:26)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead, keep going.

Stewart (25:26)
But you anyway.

Stewart (25:29)
No, no, it's so so you're you the normal person who's just using VibeCode without understanding code at all wouldn't be able to do that. So

Leo Dion (25:37)
Right. Right.

Stewart (25:39)
so what you have to do is you have to to not only use AI to produce content that you want, but also learn from that content and be able to use that so that you can further fine tune what you're doing in the future so that you can become much more efficient.

Leo Dion (25:55)
Yeah, that makes total sense.

Stewart (25:57)
Yeah.

Leo Dion (25:58)
was there anything else you wanted to mention about learning new APIs or producing instruction material or creating content that AI will actually recommend to people?

Stewart (26:10)
No, you know, I I think I'm still at that process where I'm trying to figure out the best thing for myself as it is.

Leo Dion (26:17)
Yeah. Yeah.

Stewart (26:18)
And I and I still believe that that the more that you can give it as reference, the better your results are going to be. And the more specific

Leo Dion (26:26)
One hundred percent.

Stewart (26:28)
you can be about what your endpoint is, the better the results are gonna be. So if you're developing content and and I've actually done this over the past year.

Stewart (26:39)
in wanting to create tutorials and asking it to sort of give me some ideas on and some sample code that I can use that is going to get these points across. And I and you know people I and and you know I I actually read a blog post on on Medium last year that was total fabrication. I read it, it was about new APIs in in

Stewart (27:04)
iOS 26 or whatever, and I'm reading these things and I'm thinking, Why didn't I know that? Why didn't I know that? And so I bring up a

Leo Dion (27:12)
It hallucinated?

Stewart (27:13)
project and I started to put it put it in there, was total false. They did not exist. So you gotta be really

Leo Dion (27:19)
That's hilarious.

Stewart (27:20)
careful about what people are even publishing out there because it's not all accurate. It's not true, hallucinogenic. Although I think it's getting better,

Stewart (27:31)
I d I I no, y y you have to be really weary that you can't accept everything as is. And that's that's the challenge for for learners is trying to evaluate exactly what it is that that you're you're viewing and trying to determine whether or not in fact it's actually true.

Leo Dion (27:45)
so you had mentioned Xcode. You you wanna talk like what's your workflow right now with using Xcode and AI tools?

Stewart (27:55)
Yeah, it'll depend. when I'm starting something brand new, if I'm vibe coding something brand new, I'll I'll use either codex or Claude Code, the app. And so I will create a shell of a of a project that has all of the targets that I want and the name that I want. And then I will then go through my my process of telling it what I want it to do. Now you can do that.

Stewart (28:22)
directly in Xcode as well. And and I actually created a video on vibe coding not too long ago where I actually vibe coded a Mac app in that in that video where I did it all entirely with Codex in in Xcode. But my preference right now is is basically to start off in in in in Claude Code, to build the the the framework that I want for each step. And then I'll go back into Xcode and I'll start to review each

Stewart (28:47)
Of the code that had been changed to the steps. And if it's you something that's quite and this this I have to back up a little bit. Whenever I am trying to teach something, if you tell Claude Code to create a sample project for you, it's gonna get really fancy. And it's going to create code that is really, in many cases, quite sophisticated, that would be way above or in it's gonna distract from the concepts that I want to teach.

Stewart (29:15)
So I will go back into the code and I'll review the code and and I'll highlight the code and I'll say like break this up into different components without using this special helper that you've created so that I can get it all broken up. Because if you start to just allow Claude Code to create the code, you may not really have something that you're going to be able to understand. So one of the nicest things about Xcode is just being able to select

Stewart (29:44)
the the code right within the in the in in the window there and just tell it to explain. And it will then create a fantastic explanation for you as to what that code does. And you can continue to drill down on that until you get the answer that you want. So it becomes a one to one tutor if you like on on specific code. So and I do that directly in

Leo Dion (30:06)
Is there is there like

Stewart (30:08)
Xcode.

Leo Dion (30:09)
is there a way to like I I knew in Claude Code they used to have like thinking mode where you can actually see what it's thinking. Do you know anything like options like that still are available?

Stewart (30:19)
You know,

Stewart (30:19)
I you know, I I say I was just thinking about that yesterday because it wasn't it was thinking, but it wasn't showing me what it was thinking. Right? It's just I'm almost finished thinking, it says. So what was it what was it thinking? I don't know. I I there probably

Leo Dion (30:32)
Okay.

Stewart (30:32)
is. Unfortunately, I'm not a a power user of Claude Code either. I'm you know you know, I'm not an expert at AI by any means. So I'm more along what I think your average person is in terms of using it, I'm just exploring all the different things at this point.

Leo Dion (30:48)
Yep, yep. Same here, same here. So what

Leo Dion (30:53)
You So you taught you one of the things you talk about is donkey work. What do you mean by donkey work and w wha yeah, what does that mean exactly about

Stewart (31:03)
Yeah, I

Stewart (31:04)
mean that that's a term coined by David Sparks from Mac Power Users.

Leo Dion (31:09)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stewart (31:10)
You know, he he uses that donkey work all the time, and I think it's a great term. It's the kind of stuff that you hated doing, but you had to do. And as a person who creates a lot of content on YouTube, there's a lot of stuff just creating the video is just, you know, it's the the the very beginning of of what you need to do in order to get a a product out the out the window.

Stewart (31:32)
including creating thumbnail images, descriptions, tags, promotional stuff, all of that kind of stuff is is doggy work. It doesn't take a lot of brains. So this is what I used AI for and I started to create tools that will do a lot of them for me. And one of the one of the tools was created as a result of one of the posts that you had made about getting images out of icon composer through command line.

Leo Dion (31:56)
Mm.

Leo Dion (31:57)
Yes. Yeah.

Stewart (31:58)
Right?

Stewart (32:00)
That was great, you know, because I was always having to do that export, choose the color, the you know, the the one that I wanted, the size that I wanted

Leo Dion (32:07)
Mm-hmm.

Stewart (32:08)
and all this stuff. And and I in all of my projects I always include a an icon and a splash screen. And the splash screen is always a light and dark mode version of a two hundred and fifty six pixel icon taken from the from from the icon created.

Stewart (32:26)
Well, I have a little tool that just does that for me. I just drag the icon now and it spits out the two images that I want, right? Five seconds

Leo Dion (32:33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Stewart (32:35)
to do, right? So that you know that's just a little tool to to to help me with that. I also have another tool that I created that I call a YouTube helper or white helper. That once I've created the video and uploaded it to YouTube, I'll get the transcript and then I'll just put the transcript

Stewart (32:54)
into this helper that I've got and then it spits out the YouTube description for me. It gives me all of the the chapter markers and the timing. It gives me posts that I can use for my newsletter. It'll give me a a range of of things that I can use for comments on Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever. and just does all that kind of stuff that I used to have to try and think up myself. And now it just does it for me. And

Stewart (33:23)
and then I created an another tool because I have this avatar that I've used since day one that was originally created by Bitmoji. right.

Leo Dion (33:29)
Yes, yes. We all know that one.

Stewart (33:31)
And then Bitmoji changed their algorithm and and therefore the images all started to look different. I didn't it wasn't the same me. So I was I I I knew this was coming and I had an older version, so I managed to extract a number of what I call exemplar images. And so now I've created a tool that

Stewart (33:52)
saves exemplar images or that takes a bunch of images and now I can describe whatever I want to create the image that I put on all of my YouTube thumbnails. They're all they're not bitmoji

Leo Dion (34:05)
That's awesome.

Stewart (34:05)
anymore. They're just something that I've created based on the description that I provided. You know, and I used to just at first I was just uploading a bunch of imag a bunch of exemplars to ChatGPT. Now I use the ChatGPT API to do that for me and it's an app.

Leo Dion (34:21)
Nice.

Stewart (34:23)
so the you that that's a kind of things. Another thing I've been reviewing a a book for Packt Publishing. It's gonna be out in in not too long. In fact, it's gonna be a great book by this author. It's called the SwiftUI Cookbook. But he has a GitHub where he's got all of his chapters, but it's a single GitHub repository with all of these chapters in it, and I only wanna be able to extract

Stewart (34:47)
That folder for that one thing on GitHub. I don't want to have

Leo Dion (34:50)
Yeah, yes.

Stewart (34:52)
to extract the entire thing because things may have changed or whatever. So I just created a little tube, a tool that's on Gumroad. All of these things are free. GitHub downloader that just allows you to give the specific URL for that particular folder on GitHub and it will download it to you a location of your choice. And that then has

Leo Dion (35:11)
That's awesome.

Stewart (35:12)
all of the things. the other thing, a WWDC.

Stewart (35:15)
I wanted to be able to get all of the transcripts for the video so that I could then give them to AI. And I didn't want to have to go to the WWDC video and try and select all and copy the transcript. Now all I have to do is give it the URL to my WWDC extractor, and it will extract the transcripts of any video that I give it the URL for. And then that and then have that as markdown that I can then upload to to AI for for for doing that.

Stewart (35:45)
So I mean th th th there's just I mean, I just have so much fun, right? Building tools, right? Those are the ones that are the donkey

Leo Dion (35:49)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, exactly.

Stewart (35:53)
work kinds of things, right?

Leo Dion (35:55)
how do you decide whether you're gonna let AI decide something or do something versus the parts that you do?

Stewart (36:05)
Yeah, if it's a tool, like these things that I've been talking about, I don't really care about the code. I really

Leo Dion (36:10)
Okay.

Stewart (36:11)
don't care. I just want something in the end. It's not a supportable kind of thing that if things change, I'm gonna be you know, panicking about because people have paid money for these things and and I gotta make sure that it's all up to date. These are single purpose tools that however it's done, I don't care if it's the if it's the worst code in the world, if it gets me what I want in the end.

Stewart (36:34)
I'm happy with that. But if it's something that I'm gonna really put my name behind, like the apps that I put on the App Store, these are things that I wanna have a lot more control over and be able to understand everything that's being done and then have me make decisions to make changes because I'm I I'm going back and forth with AI all the time and then going back in and fine tuning it myself.

Leo Dion (36:55)
Yep, that makes total sense. was there anything else you want to talk about concerning AI, and software development or content creation?

Stewart (37:05)
No, I you know, I just the the point of the more you know, the better you're gonna be. And I think that that's came out in that Claude document that you you you sent me earlier. I just read it this morning, and I think that that's something that if you can put that link in the show notes, I think it's really a valuable document for people to to read. and and I think the the proof is gonna become out. I think we're still more or less in early days as

Leo Dion (37:29)
Yeah, totally.

Stewart (37:31)
as the costs increase for the use of AI, the more efficient you're gonna have to be. And so the more you know, the more you understand, the better you're gonna be and be able to get the results. So you know, I'm in a little bit different position than than most other people. I'm not doing coding for for a living. I it's I do it because I'm still trying to to stay alive and stay active and and keep my brain moving, you know, at at seventy five, I wanna try and

Stewart (37:59)
you know, make sure that I I still have a few more years left in me. And this is this is what I do to to to enable that. Others who are doing this for a living, they probably will have a a little bit of a different point of view. But an awful lot of people actually watch my content are people who are similar in in age to me, you know, give or take ten years. and so it that the number of of

Stewart (38:25)
People that have been reaching out to me lately has greatly dis decreased. And one case I had a a fellow who was writing an app last year and I was mentoring him and working with him for for quite a long time to restructure his app, working with him directly, and then I suggested that maybe he get himself a Claude Code account and and just try it out to improve his app. And I heard hadn't heard from him in a while. And we managed to get his app on the app store.

Stewart (38:53)
So I reached out to him. I says, So how how are you doing? He says, great. He says, I have nine apps now on the app store. He says, I don't really know how they work, but I got nine apps on the app store. I thought, okay. So that that's gonna be an issue. and I'm sorry I I I keep on going off track here, but I think it's it's kind of relevant, is that I had I think twelve apps on the app store, most of them written in UIKit. Most of them will never get updated again.

Stewart (39:22)
Because if I went back and looked at that code, I wouldn't have a clue what I'm doing. Because at that point my method of of operation was go on to Stack Overflow, ask a question, get the code, paste it into Xcode, tweak it until it worked the way that I wanted, and then move on without really understanding. And

Leo Dion (39:41)
Mm.

Stewart (39:41)
that's what I fear is happening with a with a lot of people is that they're asking the AI to do things for them.

Stewart (39:50)
And those things are gonna get deprecated and they're never gonna be able to update their apps. Well, of course they could ask it to do it AI to do it, I suppose, but still you know, it's it's a quandary, you know.

Leo Dion (40:02)
yeah, I mean I I definitely agree with that. I think there's gonna be maintenance issues on a lot of this stuff if you don't spend some time thinking about what you're actually doing.

Stewart (40:14)
All right.

Leo Dion (40:16)
Yeah, yeah, that's too bad. Yeah. It's g it's inevitable. Before we close out, I wanted to ask, was there anything you wanted to plug involving

Leo Dion (40:28)
any of the 27 releases, OS 27 releases as far as videos you work on or APIs you've been really interested in.

Stewart (40:38)
Nothing in particular. I just because you know, I like to stay up to date, but I also recognize that people can't support the latest OS either. So that becomes a bit of an issue, particularly with now having to do, you know, if OS is 27 plus in your code, if you wanna support the iPhone Duo. I think that's gonna be a real I think that's gonna be bigger than people are imagining.

Stewart (41:03)
in terms of updating their code

Leo Dion (41:03)
yeah. I agree with that. Yeah.

Stewart (41:06)
and and going back. You know you know, there there's nothing that that that that that that my videos there's nothing sort of special. There's nothing this year in WWDC that really jumped out. It's it's more of a maintenance year and and fine tuning of things. I have an app that I that I wrote out of desire to have this because I don't know about you but

Stewart (41:28)
People often ask you for ask me for links to my video channel or this channel or whatever. Or if I'm going to someplace and they wanna have my email address and it's a very complicated, it's a big, ugly email address, and you try and spell it out for And I just wanted something on my phone that would be able to present it in large text or a QR code or be able to share it. So I created this this app called My Links, and it's free and and it

Stewart (41:54)
It's a menu bar app on the Mac and it's works on iPhone and iPad and and it's gonna work on the iPhone Duo and I'm doing all sorts of changes there. But it's my playground. And it's it's great to have a playground to be able to try out all these new things. So I I don't have to worry. No one's paid for it. If it's only gonna be available in iOS 27, well that's too bad. Nobody's losing any money over it. but it gives me the ability to to go in and and try things out.

Stewart (42:22)
and I think that's something that that everybody should have is they should have an application that is their own side project that allows them to try things out and and informate all the new APIs and just see how they work. And I think it's a great way of learning.

Leo Dion (42:37)
Yeah, no, I agree one hundred percent. Is My Links open source or is it just is it just a private yeah.

Stewart (42:42)
No, no, it's not open

Stewart (42:43)
source. it's it's just it's on the app store. yeah, and nobody finds it because, you know, I've got a small audience, but anyway.

Leo Dion (42:53)
Stewart, thank you so much for coming back on the show. I'll let you go ahead and plug where you're at on the socials and the YouTubes.

Stewart (43:02)
Yeah, I'm I'm pretty much at Stewart Lynch, S-T-E-W-A-R-T, L Y N C H everywhere. On all the socials, that's including YouTube as well. and my website is Createch Solutions, that's C-R-E-A-T-E-C-H S O L dot com. that's where you can find me. And and and my website has two pages of interest.

Stewart (43:24)
that you might want in one is the the page that goes to my all of my videos so it's a searchable and watchable database of all of the videos that I have the 450 or so that I've got on YouTube. So you can find

Leo Dion (43:37)
That's nice.

Stewart (43:38)
them all and search it. So you can search by title, search by description, and you'll find those videos that you want. So it's a little bit easier than going to YouTube. And the same thing for my blog posts. It's it's growing. It's not as big, but it'll eventually get bigger as well.

Leo Dion (43:52)
Stewart, thank you so much for coming on again. we always love to have you on. So thanks again.

Stewart (43:58)
Yeah, thanks a lot.

Leo Dion (44:00)
People can find me at brightdigit.com. If you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel or the podcast, definitely do that. we have a Patreon, patreon.com slash brightdigit, so definitely check that out to support me. I'd greatly appreciate it. And also we have the newsletter as well that you can subscribe to. So you can check that out at brightdigit.com. Thank you for joining me and I look forward to talking to you again. Bye everybody.