I had a complete shocker with all of Claude, GitHub Copilot, and ChatGPT when trying to prototype an iOS app in Swift around 12 months ago. They would all really struggle to generate anything usable, and making any progress was incredibly slow due to all the problems I was running into.
This was in stark contrast to my experience with TypeScript/NextJS, Python, and C#. Most of the time output quality for these was at least usefully good. Occasionally you’d get stuck in a tarpit of bullshit/hallucination around anything very new that hadn’t been in the training dataset for the model release you were using.
My take: there simply isn’t the community, thought leadership, and sheer volume of content around Swift that there is around these other languages. This means both lower quantity and lower quality of training data for Swift as compared to these other languages.
And that, unfortunately, plays negatively into the quality of LLM output for app development in Swift.
(Anyone who knows better, feel free to shoot me down.)
This was in stark contrast to my experience with TypeScript/NextJS, Python, and C#. Most of the time output quality for these was at least usefully good. Occasionally you’d get stuck in a tarpit of bullshit/hallucination around anything very new that hadn’t been in the training dataset for the model release you were using.
My take: there simply isn’t the community, thought leadership, and sheer volume of content around Swift that there is around these other languages. This means both lower quantity and lower quality of training data for Swift as compared to these other languages.
And that, unfortunately, plays negatively into the quality of LLM output for app development in Swift.
(Anyone who knows better, feel free to shoot me down.)