Vibe coding SwiftUI apps is a lot of fun
Highlights
- ▸SwiftUI is unusually LLM-friendly — declarative, predictable hierarchy, live preview, natural to describe in English; it vibe-codes better than most frameworks
- ▸Custom desktop apps are dropping below the 'is it worth building' threshold — 'I got frustrated with Activity Monitor' is now a good enough reason to ship your own
- ▸128GB M5 MacBook Pro + local open models + SwiftUI = private, fast vibe-coding loop with no cloud dependency
Original excerpt
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I have a new laptop—a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, which early impressions show to be _very_ capable for running good local LLMs. I got frustrated with Activity Monitor and decided to vibe code up some alternative tools for monitoring performance and I’m very happy with the results.
This is my second experiment with vibe coding macOS apps—the first was this presentation app a few weeks ago.
It turns out Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are both very competent at SwiftUI—and a full SwiftUI app can fit in a single text file, which means I can use them to spin something up without…
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