My Top 10 Vibe Coding Tools for iOS App Development

Category: App Development

Tags: AIAppsAutomationCodingTools

Entities: App ScreensAstroChat GPTCode with ChrisCursorGitHubRevenue CatSuper WhisperTelemetry DeckUX PilotZapier

Transcript

00:00

I've been teaching coding for 10 plus years on this channel and when I heard about Vive coding, I wondered how far I could take it. Could I really publish apps without coding or designing anything?

Just how much could I automate with AI? Well, in the last 3 weeks, I've published three apps into the app store and I've vibecoded and vibe designed

00:15

them all. And today, I want to share the tools that made that possible.

Oh, and stick around to the end to learn about a bonus tool that is going to speed up your vibe coding by three times. Their words, not mine.

Starting with Astro. Before even starting to vibe code, I need an app idea.

And what better way to do that than with data. Using Astro, I

00:31

can find low competition keywords that still bring in enough traffic for downloads. I did a video on keyword research with Astro right over here.

Now, finding all these juicy keywords, it's time to vibe code them all. But there's one problem.

What about UI design? That's when I stumbled upon UX Pilot.

This tool is insane. I didn't

00:48

know it was possible to generate UIs like this. Just take a look at this oneshot user flow.

You can also modify specific screens and you can adjust elements with just prompting it. You can even export to Figma and you can go into dev mode so you can get the Swift UI code for various elements.

But who has the time for that? We're vibe coding

01:04

here. Come on, get with the program.

That's why I refuse to design my own app store screenshots. I can just use app screens, another awesome tool I recently discovered that saves me a ton of time.

I can pick from a gallery of existing templates and just slot in my screenshots and captions. Or if I'm even

01:21

too lazy to do that, I'll just hit a button and generate them. Now, some cool features I really like is that although you can automate a lot of this, you can also have full control.

You can go in and you can modify specific screenshots, change the template for one of them, tweak the layout, change the font, you can do all of that. It also saves you

01:37

time if you have multiple screen sizes because it generates all of the different screen sizes for you and on all of the different devices. And you can actually even export directly into App Store Connect.

Next up is Cursor, which I've set up to have Swift syntax highlighting. I can build and compile my project right inside cursor and I can

01:53

launch the simulator as well. I still jump into Xcode from time to time if I want to take manual control because I'm just used to the shortcut keys inside Xcode, but mostly I'm not coding in Xcode or in cursor for that matter.

Yeah, there's not a lot of coding going on. 90% of the time I just tell cursor

02:09

what I want. Speaking of not coding, the sponsor of this video, Zapier, has saved me countless hours by me not having to code all the integrations between all of the different apps that I use for this business since 2018 when I started paying for and using Zapier with my own money.

If you need apps to talk to each other, you can easily set up workflows

02:26

for them to work together and you don't have to use any code at all. They recently released their MCP service which lets you supercharge your productivity by connecting Cursor to any of the thousands of tool integrations that they already have.

I did a video about it right here. What I like about the MCP service is that it removes two

02:42

major roadblocks in my opinion. Number one is security.

With these random MCP servers that you find in directories, they're often set up by individuals and I don't know if I can trust them. It's kind of like a minefield.

With Zapier, they're a legit business that has run secure integrations for years. So, I

02:57

like that I can trust them. And number two is that setting up an MCP server is actually quite technical at this point.

And I like that with Zapier, if you don't want to learn the technical stuff, you can still set up your own MCP server connected to your own personal tools without doing any coding at all, which

03:13

is kind of the theme of this video. If you're interested, you can check it out right over here or in the description below.

Now, as for the next tool on this list, you won't believe it. It's chat GPT.

Well, if I'm vibe coding in cursor, why would I need chat GPT? Well, it's for a completely different purpose.

You see, if you lay out the app as a set of

03:29

requirements, it's much easier for cursor to follow and build your app. So, following the theme of this video, which is to do as little work as possible, I literally just tell Chat GBT to generate this requirements document for me and copy and paste it directly into Cursor.

Now, you may question, can't you just tell Cursor to generate it? Yeah, I

03:47

believe you can, but cursor can't do this. I used chatd to generate my app icon.

At first, it wasn't trying very hard. It was putting up a valiant attempt, but I wasn't happy with it.

But then I finally got something I was happy with. Sweet.

Now things are starting to click, right? We're moving fast.

We're not caring about the quality of our code

04:03

or design, but we still want to make money, right? And how are you going to do that without a payw wall?

That's why we use Revenue Cat to set up payw walls like nobody's business. I really like their new payw wall editor.

You have a ton more templates to select from. And once you do select a template, the editor gives you total control over the

04:18

layout and all of the elements on the payw wall. And as usual, it is insanely fast to integrate RevenueCat into your project.

In fact, I vibe integrated it. I added this to my requirements doc and I just told cursor to do it.

And guess what? It works.

Okay, so now we have our payw wall. But there's one more critical

04:35

thing that all apps even vibe coded ones need and that is analytics. And I use telemetry deck for that.

If you're not tracking, then you won't know which app shows promise and which app to invest more effort into. And also telemetry deck is as easy to integrate as revenue was.

I just added this set of

04:51

instructions to the requirements document and I told cursor to initialize the SDK as well as to use its best judgment as to what to track inside the app. Another reason I use telemetry deck is because it has an integration with revenue so that you can see all of the user actions leading up to the sale.

It

05:06

just gives you better insights and analytics so you can make more informed decisions. Plus, they recently launched an acquisitions dashboard that has a lot of pretty charts, pretty colors, and pretty numbers.

Now, this next one I would not even think about vibe coding without, and that is GitHub. This is where I draw the line.

I know Git source

05:23

control, it's not a very vibe cody sort of thing. We're supposed to surrender control, right?

But AI has messed up my project far too often for me not to use source control. Despite cursor having this restore checkpoint functionality, which admittedly I do use quite a bit, sometimes it goes so far down the rabbit

05:38

hole of apocalyptic projectwide changes that it cannot recover and you need a reliable reset button. GitHub is that.

But since I'm a solo vibe coder, I am free to write commit messages like this. Hey, don't judge because it's Monday.

No, not the day, but the tool. I use

05:55

Monday to run all of the operations here at Code with Chris. So, I also use it for these apps that I'm building.

I have a template for my vibecoded apps. Essentially, it's just like a checklist because a lot of these apps all require the same sort of things and it's useful to keep everything in one place.

To be honest, you can just use any project

06:10

management tool that you'd like. Okay, now for that bonus tool I told you about that is going to speed up your entire vibe coding process.

I want to add a feature that lets the user select a photo album to review. Can you think through the steps of how we would do this?

Don't code anything yet. Just show me what to do.

06:29

Super Whisper allows you to bend cursor to your will faster than your fingers can. It either has cloud audio processing or you can choose local device audio processing for more privacy, which is what I did.

I mean, until Neurolink gets their act together and is released to the masses, Super Whisper is probably the fastest we can

06:45

get. This tool list is a result of my own vibe coding journey, but there is so much that I haven't explored or tried yet.

So, if you have tools that you're using or if you have tools that you'd like me to explore, please leave them in the comment section below. And also, if you're interested in the workflow I use to vibe code and publish those three apps into the app store, let me know

07:00

below as well.