We spent 2 weeks implementing the New Architecture and trying to understand its benefits and limits. That included asking friends at Instagram, Spotify, and other teams what they thought.

It wasn't even close to being ready. And worse: unreliable. We pivoted and spent the winter in "deep work" mode learning Swift..

That moment was a "bet the farm" kind of moment. We knew that AI struggled hard with Swift/SwiftUI and understanding the layout of the applications.

Worse, there are no crypto packages to lean on like viem or @peterferguson.eth's react-native-passkeys.

So we just wrote everything ourselves using Swift Crypto. And got way better at prompting.

Predictions Protocol https://onit.fun | react-native-passkeys maintainer | Variant Founder Fellow | Cambridge Alum | Formerly Ireland's #3 powerlifter (74kg)

We're now on the other side of the learning and refining. Every day is a compounding day. I figure we're about a month out from the App Store. 

Then about a few months out from data science worth bragging about.

January to about mid-April we did it mostly without AI, mid-April to now, AI is doing most of the structured thinking, but still gotta implement it by hand. There's quite a bit of hallucination and false confidence/sidequesting it will perform.

With crypto libraries you can't go too far off the directive.

Do you think this would have been tractable with your team size and experience without AI assistance?

That moment was a "bet the farm" kind of moment. We knew that AI struggled hard with Swift/SwiftUI and understanding the layout of the applications.

Worse, there are no crypto packages to lean on like viem or @peterferguson.eth's react-native-passkeys.

So we just wrote everything ourselves using Swift Crypto. And got way better at prompting.

https://github.com/apple/swift-crypto

Ahhh yeah I misunderstood didn’t realize this was not recent. Either way I did not intend any shade whatsoever. You’re saying the initial build was in react?

Wdym? We had just launched our alpha group, got great feedback, had a pretty good idea what was working and not. We were pushing React Native pretty hard and not getting good results.

We also were skating by on just the Seed Club accelerator preseed we raised 8 months prior..

Having a funded startup is wild you can just spend two weeks doing something that doesn’t build momentum

i love to see people making things happen like this 🙌🏻