SwiftUI and neural networks: when a TO-DO list isn't ambitious enough anymore

Every programmer wakes up at some point with an obsessive idea to write their own game. Usually this impulse crashes against harsh reality: you need to learn complex engines like Unity or Unreal Engine, figure out physics, and spend months studying documentation. But in an era when neural networks have become our new "smart" partners, the rules of the game are changing.

The author of the StarDust Collector project decided to take the path of least resistance, choosing SwiftUI as the foundation and the help of artificial intelligence. After he successfully (or almost successfully) assembled a custom task manager, his ambitions naturally grew. This is a classic example of how a technology originally designed for creating buttons and lists transforms into a tool for realizing creative fantasies.

Context plays a key role here. A year ago, macOS development was considered the domain of a rather narrow circle of specialists willing to tolerate the peculiarities of the Apple ecosystem. However, the emergence of powerful language models made entry into this sandbox practically free. The author was not afraid to use SwiftUI — a declarative framework that developers typically use for corporate applications or simple interfaces. Attempting to make this framework work as a game engine looks at minimum bold, and at maximum like subtle irony over traditional development methods. It's like trying to assemble a racing car from furniture assembly kit parts, where AI acts as a dubious but very diligent instruction.

What has actually changed in the working process? The main difference from classical coding is that the developer no longer writes code in a vacuum. They conduct a dialogue.

In the case of StarDust Collector, AI took on the grunt work: generating basic structures, processing key press events, and even attempting to implement game logic. Of course, there were problems. Neural networks tend to hallucinate when it comes to specific SwiftUI desktop limitations.

But this is exactly where the new role of the human emerges — now they are not simply a "coder," but a senior editor and architect who filters the stream of ideas generated by the machine. This transforms the development process into a kind of intellectual ping-pong, where iteration speed increases many times over.

Why is this case important for the industry as a whole? We are witnessing how AI is finally shattering the myth of "the necessity of deep knowledge" to get started. If previously creating a game for macOS required years of experience, today it takes only an understanding of the basics and the ability to formulate requests correctly.

This opens doors for thousands of indie developers whose ideas previously gathered dust on shelves due to lack of technical skills. StarDust Collector is not just a puzzle, it is a symbol of the democratization of development. Yes, SwiftUI has its limits, and yes, AI can make mistakes, but the result is there: a working application in the App Store, created without years of Swift training.

In the end, we arrive at an interesting conclusion about the future of software. Soon we will stop evaluating programs by the complexity of their code, because code will become a "free" and infinite resource. What will remain important is only the idea and the person's ability to bring it to completion, using AI as a lever. Game development on SwiftUI sounds like an oxymoron, but it is precisely such strange hybrids that show us where the world is headed. We are no longer limited by tools; we are limited only by our own imagination and patience in communicating with a chatbot.

Key question: Will SwiftUI become a new standard for indie games on Mac, or is it simply a temporary anomaly caused by the hype around AI?