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isn't this useless with Claude Code now?

absolutely no. Alex is heavily optimized for xcode. If you work on an ios project that has more than 700 files, you'll understand how accurate it captures the context.

If your iOS project has more than 700 files... you might be doing it wrong?

Bear in mind 600 of those files are icon and screenshot variants for various screen dpis and spec ratios..

In your mind is 700 files a lot or a little? It feels very small to me, and Xcode really ought to be able to handle that tiny scale on modern machines with ease.

I struggle to imagine a team of more than 10 people writing an iOS app with less than 700 files.

Instagram.app likely has 30,000 files for iOS. And it produces 10-figures of revenue. So how is that wrong?

I mean.. say its an enterprise mobile app. Maybe there are 2 shells, each shell has 5 tabs. Each tab might have 5 screens on it.. that's 50 files already just for the screens. Each screen might have various UI components or steppers, etc.

Most noobs, such as those who think 700 files is too many because they've only worked on apps they never published, might just cram everything into that one file.

However, there would be various files for components, functions, etc. Code that's single responsibility and easy to test might mean there are lots of files. There might be upload queues, offline functionality, custom code to go beyond what the ios/android SDKs offer, and so on. DTOs, DAOs, etc. various services..

You probably (won't) get the gist but yeah.

In fairness, as a mere generator of eyeball time that gets mis-sold* to advertisers, I'd say the FB user experience is very much "doing something wrong".

* dick pills and boob surgery, also government announcements for a country I don't live in, also offers to help renounce a citizenship I never had in the first place

Translation files, themes, drawables .etc...the list is endless. Even a simple app will easily have a thousand files.

> Alex is heavily optimized for xcode.

Is there a reason why the Claude cannot do the same thing?

It's not that Claude can't but iOS / Apple development is such a bear and beast. You could really build a whole model just to solve for that ecosystem. There are huge issues in the Apple ecosystem with documentation and so much tribal knowledge. In many cases it's hard to know what is the right thing to do, and there is keeping up with all of Apple's required changes.

So Claude could do it, it just seems like they're focusing on a different set of developers for the moment.

I don't think that makes it as special as you think it does.

> There are huge issues in the Apple ecosystem with documentation and so much tribal knowledge.

I struggle to come up with an ecosystem where that doesn't apply. React, Angular, .NET, .... Though some of them probably even suffer from overdocumentation, e.g. React with the same beginner level tutorials / open source code regurgitating bad patterns, and you then have the challenge of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The question is really whether maintaining an ecosystem-specific model would be able outperform a better generalized coding model, and even further whether the marginal improvements would justify the additional maintenance process/cost.