Hey Reader,

Can Cursor AI (using Claude Sonnet 3.5 or ChatGPT) build your apps?

Yes.

But are those apps going to be good?

Probably not.

There is a lot of Hype about AI in the development scene, and I want to show you what it’s like.

​Watch my latest video: Can AI Really Code? My Honest Take On Cursor AI​

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• See what feature the AI helped create
• Watch me use Cursor for the first time
• See the challenges first-hand with AI code assistants

You can’t expect great results from my experience and watching other iOS developers work with the current LLM AIs on YouTube. The AI will introduce bugs and break the UI.

It becomes tiring to copy and paste code back and forth to ChatGPT or Claude, and there are mistakes between each iteration. There is a better way . . .

Cursor AI (Editor)

Cursor AI promises you can modify your code files directly and progress faster.

The challenge is that those suggestions are not always good.

I don’t trust AI as it tends to break my existing code. It replaces things I don’t want it to touch, which means more work on my part to verify the changes are good.

If you want to explore using AI, I suggest using git and branches as you work. You should stash changes if the AI can’t get it working and try a different approach.

I created a special branch just for the experiment AI-driven feature, and when one AI failed to get the code working, I branched and attempted to let the other one figure it out.

Ultimately, you still need to know how to code because you will fix the parts that don’t work.

Window Snapping Logic on Mac (Super Easy Slides)

For the sake of an experiment this past week, I used AI to help me write window-snapping logic. Previously, I wrote a mini demo of this functionality for my Super Easy Timer, but I ran into multi-monitor window bugs that prevented me from shipping it.

Windows on the edges would sometimes snap to the wrong monitor.

You can try my window snapping logic with my Super Easy Slides TestFlight beta.​

I learned this snapping was because if you set the window origin, that point could be on either monitor when it’s offscreen or near the edge. So, to help the windowing system manage offscreen windows, you need to set the full frame. That way, the windowing system can see the window is offscreen on your current monitor.

Neither Claude nor ChatGPT was smart enough to suggest this as a workaround; I had to think about and experiment with it. From my experience, that’s always the challenge of macOS development. The documentation doesn’t talk about all the nuances related to window positioning. It feels like a lot of trial and error.

Let me know if you have any tips or best practices for prompting the AI with Cursor.

Talk soon,

-Paul

P.S.

• ​Watch my video on git about how to do an interactive rebase. This skill is something that you need when working on team projects with long-running branches.

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• Want to get started with Swift Testing? It’s new in Xcode 16, and you can watch two videos here.

1. ​Swift Testing with Test Plans and Floating Point Equality​
2. ​Swift Testing 101 - Xcode 16 Tutorial​

• Click here to watch my macOS #DevLog video on keyboard shortcuts and the full-screen features of my Super Easy Slide show app.

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• Michael, who has been beta testing Super Easy Slides, made me think there could be an opportunity for a new macOS Sticky note style app that could work on Full Screen apps. Watch that app idea here.​

P.P.S. If you want to beta test my Super Easy Slides app, you can join the TestFlight beta here and send me your feedback. I’m using the app to create slideshows for my videos and play with different styles of videos.