From vibe coding an idea to shipping a real iOS app

I wanted to share a bit of my experience with vibe coding, because about a year and a half ago this project was basically just an idea.

I train regularly and use an Apple Watch, but I kept feeling that my fitness data was scattered everywhere. One place for workouts, another for recovery, another for fasting or hydration, and lots of metrics without much help deciding what I should actually do next.

So I started thinking about building my own workout planner.

At the beginning, I wasn't thinking about launching a company or even necessarily publishing an app. I just wanted to see whether I could turn the idea in my head into something I could actually use.

That's where AI-assisted development completely changed what felt possible.

I started iterating through conversations: describing screens, changing flows, questioning logic, fixing bugs, redesigning things I didn't like, and gradually adding more complicated features.

Instead of needing to know exactly how to build everything before starting, I could work backwards from what I wanted the product to do.

There were plenty of moments where the AI-generated solution wasn't right. Sometimes fixing one thing broke another. Sometimes I realized that what I had asked for wasn't actually good UX in the first place.

But that became part of the process.

Vibe coding, at least for me, isn't "tell AI to build an app and you're done."

It's much closer to having an incredibly fast technical collaborator where you still need to understand the product, challenge the output, test everything, and make hundreds of decisions about how things should actually work.

The project eventually moved into a fully native iOS build using Xcode and SwiftUI. From there it kept growing.

A simple workout planner turned into something that can now handle strength and cardio workouts, Apple Watch integration, health and recovery data, hydration, fasting, training trends, and progress insights.

And somehow, that project that started as "I wonder if I can build this?" eventually became a real app that passed App Store review and is now live.

That's probably the part that still feels the strangest.

Vibe coding didn't remove the work. If anything, it made me ambitious enough to take on much more work because suddenly ideas that I would previously have dismissed as technically out of reach became things I could at least attempt.

It also taught me a huge amount along the way. I'm much better now at understanding architecture, debugging, data models, Apple Watch synchronization, HealthKit, subscriptions, App Store requirements, and all the small edge cases you don't think about when you're just imagining an app.

And the project is definitely not finished.

There are still plenty of things I want to improve, especially around personalization, insights, and eventually making the product better at answering a simple question:

"Based on everything you know about my training and recovery, what should I do next?"

But getting from an idea to a product that people can actually use is already much further than I expected when I started.

For anyone experimenting with vibe coding and wondering whether you can build something real with it: you absolutely can.

Just don't treat the AI as the product builder.

You still have to be the product manager, tester, designer, critic, and ultimately the person responsible for deciding whether what was built is actually good.

I'm curious how others here are using vibe coding. Have you taken anything from a random idea all the way to a shipped product?