Here's a summary of the themes expressed in the Hacker News discussion about Bitrig:
Appreciation for Hacker News
Many users expressed deep gratitude for Hacker News, highlighting its significant impact on their personal and professional development. This sentiment was initiated by the original poster (OP), who credited HN for shaping their career.
- kylemacomber stated, "On a personal note, I wanted to thank the HN community. I’ve been reading HN since college (for over 15 years now!) and it’s been formative in my development as a software engineer and leader."
- kylemacomber further elaborated on this influence: "Many of the books I read, blogs I frequent, and podcasts I listen to, I found via HN. I think it’s fair to say, if it weren’t for HN, that Bitrig wouldn’t be Bitrig and SwiftUI wouldn’t be SwiftUI."
App Store Approval and Limitations
A recurring topic was the process and challenges of getting an app like Bitrig approved on the App Store, especially given its nature as a developer tool that executes user-generated code.
- HellsMaddy questioned, "Was it difficult to get Bitrig approved on the App Store? If I had to guess just based on the idea, it seems like the sort of thing Apple would take issue with."
- kylemacomber addressed this, noting, "Heh... it definitely wasn't an overnight approval. However, Apple has relaxed the guidelines for developer tools compared to the early days of the App Store. If you look today there are Python IDEs, Jupyter Notebooks, and various other apps that execute user generated code. The key guideline to be mindful of is 2.5.2."
User Interface and Styling
Users commented on the visual appeal of the apps generated by Bitrig, with one user finding the styling unexpectedly good and contrasting it with other AI tools.
- FlamingMoe was pleasantly surprised by the styling: "Neat. I just tried it out and one thing I was pleasantly surprised about was the styling it came up with. It was sleek, and it did not have the purply gradienty tailwindy styling that I always get from Claude."
- kylemacomber shared insights into their approach: "Today in our system prompt we say 'ALWAYS make the design Apple-like. Use clean typography and consistent padding/spacing.' However, tbh it's not something we carefully tested." They also acknowledged SwiftUI's inherent design advantages: "For the most part, I think the look and feel of the apps benefits from SwiftUI baking Apple's design system into the defaults so heavily."
- fragmede provided feedback on a specific UI issue: "I'm on an iPhone SE, and the UI doesn't quite fit. The response text isn't easily scrollable, so I have to drag the text up, instead of just scrolling." This was acknowledged by kylemacomber, who stated, "I confess, I did not test it on an SE. We'll take a look!"
- Erazal also noted a UX issue with the prompt panel: "Quick note: it’s hard to pull down the prompt panel down, and makes for a frustrating UX (just there)." tdonnelly responded to this, saying, "Thanks for the feedback - that one has come up before so stay tuned for updates."
Login Methods and User Experience
Discussions arose around the app's login process, with a strong preference expressed against email/OTP verification and in favor of more modern, secure methods like passkeys.
- avarun voiced a strong opinion: "Also, side note: magic link or email-based OTP login is by far my least favorite method of login, especially for a phone app. It's cumbersome, annoying, and completely unnecessary now that passkeys exist. Barring that I'd still rather use email/pw login any day of the week."
- jacobx acknowledged this feedback and indicated future plans: "We've definitely been hearing from users who don't like OTP, we'll try to get additional login options added soon."
- avarun further elaborated on the inconvenience of OTP: "It’s 2 extra butter clicks to generate a password and save it on 1Password, and you never have to leave your current context. Versus for email OTP you have to switch to your email client, find the email, perhaps refresh a few times waiting for it to come in, click into the email once you see it, highlight the OTP, click copy, then switch back to the app and finally paste. I don’t understand how anybody could possibly prefer it."
- sunnybeetroot offered a counterpoint, particularly for mobile users: "That’s interesting, on a desktop device I would agree. However having to create an account on 1Password for an app I just want to try is a pain compared to using Apple’s Hide my email and entering in the OTP. I get that it didn’t work for you but it did for me."
Monorepo and Code Integration
Questions were raised about Bitrig's compatibility with existing monorepos and how generated code could be integrated into larger projects.
- Johnny_Bonk inquired about monorepo usage: "So I have an existing typescript project, can I still use your software to build the app part of it in a monorepo?"
- jacobx responded by addressing current limitations and workarounds: "We don't currently have support for editing code directly within a repository, but that's something we're excited about adding. In the meantime, one thing that's worked well for us is building a component/screen/etc as a standalone piece in bitrig, and then bringing it into a larger project from your computer later. You can easily export the code you make in bitrig for those kinds of workflows."
AI-Powered App Development Limitations and Potential
Several users discussed the capabilities and limitations of using AI, like Claude, for building production-ready applications, with a consensus that it's excellent for prototyping but still has a way to go for complex projects.
- saadn92 commented on the difficulty of complex app building: "This is a really good idea, but I’ve noticed that, even with developer experience and using Claude code, building a complex app is extremely difficult and takes dozens of prompts to get things actually working. This is probably a great prototyping tool, but I’m curious to know how far this can go to build production level apps."
- jacobx shared their current assessment and future outlook: "With what we've tried so far, Bitrig already works well for prototyping and making smaller apps. Really large and complex apps will probably require improvements to both Bitrig and the underlying models. However, both those are coming :)"
- markden highlighted the prompt iteration cost: "I just burned my 5 free messages to get a simple toggle button working that just says 'win' (with animated fireworks!) and 'lose'. I'm sure I'm not an efficient prompter, but it seems I'd knock out 100 messages easily in an afternoon, which looks to be the monthly limit at $20/mo."
- kylemacomber playfully addressed the message limit: "Don't tell anyone, but once you're on the paid plan we're not actually enforcing the 100 message limit right now ;) We're still in the learning phase, and are going to adjust the plans based on exactly the kind of considerations you're raising."
- markden suggested a complementary AI role: "It's almost like you need an intermediate 'cheap/dumb' AI as a proxy to flesh everything out ahead of sending it off to be coded ... something that crisps up all the requirement and ultimately crafts a more cost-effective and likely all-around-better prompt."
On-Device Code Execution and Prototyping
A user inquired about the possibility of creating native Swift apps directly on an iOS device without AI, akin to existing Python development tools on mobile.
- ForceBru asked: "Are there iOS apps that let me create native Swift apps for my phone (including execution on my device, not in the cloud), on my phone, but without chatting to AI? Just by writing code, the 'old' way?"
- CharlesW suggested an existing option: "There's the excellent Swift Playground for iOS, requires an iPad: https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/"
- kylemacomber clarified Bitrig's approach: "You can edit the code directly in Bitrig, but we haven't optimized the experience around that."
- ForceBru further defined their need: "I'm imagining quick prototyping (including on-device, offline execution) of small pieces of code (potentially growing into a small app) with the software keyboard, like in Pythonista or Pyto. My workflow often goes like this: got an idea, let me quickly test it on the go, like while walking down the street, working on unrelated stuff or just chilling. Open up Pythonista, write some code, run it, tweak it, etc."
- kylemacomber found this useful: "Cool, that's really helpful context. We'll take a look at the code editing experience in those apps for inspiration."
Underlying Technology and SwiftUI Mapping
There was curiosity about how Bitrig accurately maps natural language prompts to native SwiftUI components.
- sukh asked for technical details: "Can you share any under the hood details of how the system is able to accurately map the loose prompt to fully native SwiftUI components. Mostly curious because I’d love to also build internal data dense apps typically better suited for desktop."
- jacobx provided a high-level explanation: "Yeah, the prompt is just asking Claude to generate a SwiftUI iPhone app. The recent models have been able to generate really good Swift code, so we just have a set of best practice instructions we've been accumulating (telling it to make an app with @main, pointing it to/away from some APIs, encouraging it to persist things in UserDefaults, etc). I think most of that would work pretty well for making SwiftUI desktop apps too."
- w10-1 added a comment about the learning curve of SwiftUI: "It would be lovely if the community had this knowledge about API's to avoid and approached to adopt. SwiftUI programming is a tightrope walk of stuff that works over a chasm of time lost to testing."
Bug Reports and Initial Setup Issues
Some users reported initial problems with the app, including crashes and data loss during the setup or interaction process.
- sidchilling reported a critical issue: "I downloaded the app but it keeps crashing on open."
- jacobx responded to this, asking for clarification: "Sorry to hear that! What version of iOS are you running?"
- saaaaaam described a frustrating experience with lost work: "Doesn’t work at all for me. Entered my my prompt… It did a bunch of stuff - apparently initially focused on making me an app icon which I don’t really care about. I moved away from the app, went back and everything had gone and my prompt was just sitting there by itself. ... So that’s two of my five free messages zapped. And all of my patience."
- jacobx apologized and offered a remedy: "Sorry about that, I reset your free messages for the day, so you should be back at 5. Moving in and out of the project while messages are sending is a more fragile area of the app and we have some bugs to fix there."
Feature Requests and Future Directions
Users also suggested potential features and discussed broader implications for app development, including the future of voice assistants.
- WhitneyLand suggested showcasing more complex features: "If Bitrig can do things like let your app have editable data, or make rest api calls, etc. it would be nice to see a little more in the demo video."
- kylemacomber agreed with the need for a more comprehensive demo: "Ya, I agree it makes sense for us to record a more tutorial length demo at this point and we can show off things like that."
- markden suggested an intermediate AI step for prompt refinement.
- jaccola drew parallels to Siri: "It doesn't seem like this is the direction you are going, but this feels like what Siri could become... With your sunscreen example, I should be able to just ask Siri to do exactly this, and it could tap me in my pocket, show me a custom UI to log periodically and then disappear."
- jacobx acknowledged the potential of dynamic UI generation: "Yeah, I think that whole area of dynamically generating UI is really interesting. And having a Swift interpreter like we're using would unlock doing that with native UI components."
General Enthusiasm and Support
Despite some bugs and limitations, many users expressed excitement and support for Bitrig, with some even subscribing to paid plans shortly after trying it.
- Erazal expressed strong immediate positive sentiment: "I’ve just tested it out, and purchased a subscription within 5 minutes, for an app we were seriously discussing with a friend over the last days. Keep crushing!"
- pybae offered congratulations: "this is super super cool - awesome to see something technically hard and novel. congrats on the launch!"
- WhitneyLand also shared positive sentiment: "Hey Kyle, looks very cool!"
- sukh indicated future customer intent: "Great work and I hope to become a paying customer soon!"