alt Hacker NewsI’ve been a React Native developer for 8 years, I’ve written many apps with it professionally and personally. Until recently, I would have recommended it wholeheartedly.
This weekend I had an idea I set out to experiment with: if I have an existing React Native app, how much effort would it take an LLM to rewrite it into genuinely native apps. My idea being I no longer need to write cross-platform code and pay the intermediary framework costs, I’d get direct access to the underlying platform. Instead, I could just spec the features I need in the app and the LLM can build it.
It took me a year to build the original app to production quality by hand. My “twins”, as they’ve become known, were at 80% completion in three days of on-off work.
I’m pretty much convinced my experiment was a success. Which sorta terrifies me that I’ve specialised in a technology that can be, for all intents and purposes, be entirely erased.
The only caveat I can find is it is still a great technology for doing cross-platform mobile and web. Using something like Tamagui (as rough as that can be sometimes) allows genuine code sharing across all platforms.
Sucks most that I’m now actively looking for a new React Native role.
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Be careful, I’ve been using AI to translate my Swift code to Kotlin and sometimes it makes some mistakes that are invisible to you, because the languages are so similar, but it will bite you in the ass eventually, because there are subtle changes between the platforms
Not saying that LLM development isn't fast, but doing a re-implementation of something you know in-and-out is almost always going to be faster, as you skip the probably most time intensive step of product research and requirement engineering.
I really believe this is the way forward, native platform UI built by AI.
I'm trying it now with an app and so far it's working really well. I build what I can cross platform, the non-ui stuff, then have AI build the UI for each platform.
It even implemented native low-level graphics on each platform: metal, vulkan, and d3d12. It builds SwiftUI on Apple platforms, WinUI3 on Windows, GTK4 on Linux, Compose on Android. The cross platform stuff is Zig with a C ABI.
And yeah, it's a bit terrifying how fast you can iterate. I've built for all these platforms in about a month. It would have taken at least a year, maybe more before. I haven't even optimized the process by having AI agents follow my lead automatically, so as I finish features on the primary platform they could start building the others by watching. Requires some setup I haven't tackled yet (VMs for all platforms with agents waiting).