Senior iOS engineer. Understanding things properly.
Notes on Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit and the odd system behavior the docs skip. Some posts are guides, some are me thinking out loud. The goal is always the same: understand it properly, not just make it compile.
At one of my interviews I was told I could use AI. Some companies go further: no typing code by hand, everything goes through the agent. In my rounds I got a short spec, a few screenshots and about an hour to build an app from scratch. Bring your own tools, use whatever you know.
You’d think you hand the task to the model and go get coffee. Coffee is cancelled.
An engineer from the team sits across from you, sometimes two. While the agent writes code, the conversation goes on: you explain what you’re doing and why, and they mostly stay quiet and listen. They might ask about the language and the platform, about decisions in real projects, about how you work with AI. Why did you write the prompt that way? How do you check the result? What do you use RAG for? What helps you keep the model in check?
On a normal workday I can watch the agent and add clarifications as it goes. In the interview I’m explaining something to the person across the table at that exact moment. Meanwhile the agent finishes, and I have to read the result, decide what’s next and write the next prompt. There’s rarely time for a calm review. You skim the code, make the call fast, and the conversation doesn’t stop.
Once a week my feed serves up another prediction: in a year or two AI will replace programmers, juniors are obsolete, learning to code is pointless. The authors change, the arguments don’t. Someone shows an agent building an app in an evening, someone quotes a CEO promising investors to “do more with fewer people”, and a thread about the end of the profession is ready. The hype crowd keeps pouring the same three ideas from one glass into another, and every round they sound more certain.
InlineArray is a fixed-size array that keeps its elements inline, with no separate heap allocation. What it can do, what it can’t, and when it is worth using.
