Over a decade ago, when I was building my own startup, I wrote the backend, built the web frontend and deployed the servers, created the iOS and Android apps, sold them in App Store and Google Play Store. I wasn’t afraid of trying new stack. I tried .Net, PHP (Laravel), NodeJS (ExpressJS), Python (FastAPI), Cordova (cross-platform ) and many other languages and frameworks. I was just trying to make things work, with help from Google and Stack Overflow.

After my startup, I specialized deeply into iOS platform because I loved it. I have had so much fun working on many apps used by million of users.

But that focus came with a cost.

When Focus Becomes a Constraint

Being an iOS engineer meant I could build great apps. But every great mobile product needs a bigger system working behind the scene: APIs, database, deployment scripts, data pipelines, etc…

I could design them conceptually, but writing them from scratch meant diving into a completely different stack, sometimes programming languages Python, Node.js, React, Go. I know I can develop BE with Swift, but I’d still need to get familar with Vapor, HummingBird frameworks, and also the BE engineering mindsets.

So I stayed in my comfort zone. I focused on the client side, while the other stuffs got handed off to backend or web teams. The result? I built great apps, but the scope of what I could build alone gradually shrank.

The Turning Point — AI as a Bridge

Then AI changed everything.

For the first time in years, I could describe what I wanted in plain English, “build a simple Prompt Composer web app in NextJS”, “build a AI agent in Python”, and get working code very quickly.

AI became my multilingual engineering partner. It translates my ideas into implementation, regardless of the language or framework.

Suddenly, I wasn’t limited by syntax or stack. I was free to focus on product requirements, system architecture, behavior, and user experience, the parts that actually matter.

The New Mindset

Nowaday, I don’t see myself as “just” an iOS developer. With AI as my assistant, I feel again the power of being able to create anything, from backend, to website, to apps, in any languages or

The difference, in comparision to my situation 10 years ago, is that, I don’t need to know every language or framework, I just need to know what I want to build.

AI has turned knowledge barriers into creative freedom.

Productivity gains

With this freedom, I have recently explored some ways to improve my productivity at works by integration AI features into the tools I am using regularly in my day job.

At work, I’m using Lookin a lot to inspect and debug UI issues for the OKX app. Sometimes we need to fix small UI issues, like wrong padding, wrong colors, wrong autolayout constraints. Due to the massive code base, the workflow takes quite a lot of time to identify the issues, fix the issues, rebuild to verify the fixes, create new MR for the fixes.

The Lookin app is an old Objective-C app with a lot of complex logics. It was written completely in Objective-C, using very old frameworks such as ReactiveObjC. It’d take me a lot of time to understand the codebase and add the AI functionality I wanted to build.

By using Cursor, I could easily verify my idea over the weekend. These are few demos where I have successfully manipulated some UIs from a running iOS app using AI, without touching any code.

Changing UIView

🧪 Experimenting with visual vibe coding an iOS app with hot reloading.

Visually changing UIs without writing any line of code and get instant feedback from a running app

The workflow feels like magic 🪄. pic.twitter.com/SfSTBtQg4P

— An Tran (@antranapp) October 11, 2025

Fix autolayout conflict

Solving iOS autolayout conflicts like a boss 😎 pic.twitter.com/hc5Vx0lt3i

— An Tran (@antranapp) October 18, 2025

Rewrite UIKit to SwiftUI

Rewrite a UIKit view to SwiftUI visually. It worked quite well 👌 pic.twitter.com/IT5gfFf7qc

— An Tran (@antranapp) October 18, 2025

Conclusion

For iOS developers like me, that’s the real superpower, not just coding faster, but thinking bigger.

The stack no longer defines us. Our imagination does. The sky is the limit.