Native iOS and macOS Development With Amp

When I recorded that video yesterday about how I'm using Amp to build Amp, people had some questions about orbs, like what if the app that they're building doesn't work in an orb in like a Linux machine. And we think that local dev is dead, but there's a few reasons why you still might need it. And one of those reasons is if you're doing native app development. I think that we can make orbs work better for that in the future, but for now it really helps to still run that on an actual macOS machine, probably your own machine that's got all the Xcode certificates and so on. So I want to show how we've been doing this because spoiler alert, we're actually coming out with a native-ish macOS and iOS app, although the Progressive Web App works pretty nicely and it's what you see here. So I've not done macOS or iOS development in a long time, never written a line of Swift manually myself, only Objective-C.

So I'm just gonna walk through what I did to make it so that our work-in-progress native app can be improved through Amp. I started out just asking it, you know, here's kind of what I want to do and let me know what else. This is like a planning prompt, but notice I didn't need to toggle into a specific planning mode. Agents and Amp are good at knowing the intent, gave me a bunch of ideas, and then when I was ready to go build, I am using an Amp runner. Now I'm on my macOS MacBook Pro right now, and in my terminal I'm running `amp --no-tui`, which basically means that then from the web I can start threads instead of in an orb, like on the cloud, I can start threads on my MacBook Pro, but also the agent can start threads there as well. That agent-to-agent communication is a really powerful primitive that lets me do things like just ask Amp to go and do iOS development.

I probably wouldn't even need to, you know, say which runner. I think it would probably figure that out. And then when I start telling it to do things in the iOS app, it creates a thread and an agent on my MacBook Pro and it interacts with that. And we can, you know, actually do something now and I'll show you what that looks like. Just, you know, something really simple. We'll say make it so that when in our iOS app it launches it says "hello world" and then rebuild it and reinstall on my connected device and rerun it. Man, I love dictation. It makes things so much faster. Alright, so what it's going to do is it's going to send that, send a message to the thread that is running on my laptop. So here we go.

And I can click in and see. This, that message is what it wrote. It sometimes will add another, you know, bit of extra context to my message if I just YOLO speak something, which is nice. And here you can see this is my test iPhone and we'll see it work. It's got to write a little bit of code first before it does that, but it should do this pretty quickly. So we probably will have Darwin orbs in the future, but for a lot of native development it's actually nicer to do it on a real machine, your like pet laptop or something, because that's where you have all the certificates. I think that once you're doing native development at scale you probably make your app able to be run there, but you know still like the Apple development experience still has some like non command line automatable things in it.

Although the agent can get pretty far. So Amp runners are nice. It's also nice that in Amp runners are just native. It works. It's not like a different experience with weird limitations that you run into. All right, there we go. You can see it did that. And here's my other hand. I guess I could have been cheating and typing a bunch of stuff on my computer, but no, I think you can see the agent did it all. So summarize, one thing that orbs do not work well with right now is native macOS and iOS development, but you can just use an Amp runner, which is on your machine running this, and then the agent can go make threads that run on your own machine and take advantage of your own configured Xcode and certificates and connected devices and all of that. So keep the feedback coming.

One thing we love is that you all send us feedback about even the smallest things. I think what that shows is, you know, that we really care. So keep that coming. We want to help you get away from local dev as much as possible so that you can do so much more work in parallel. That's the life that we're living and it feels incredible. It feels like there's more change that's good in the last month than all of last year. And last year was not some quiet year for development. All right, thanks for watching.