Shipped an iOS app solo with Cursor, zero coding experience before February
10 years as a 3D artist, never touched Xcode or written a line of code before this year. In February I opened Cursor and just started typing what I wanted to build.
7 months later, backend on Cloudflare Workers, iOS app in SwiftUI, multi-model AI routing (GPT, Claude, Gemini), all written and shipped through Cursor. Launched on the App Store, now live on Product Hunt today.
Biggest surprise for me: the hard part was never writing the code, Cursor handled most of that. The hard part was learning to think in systems, architecture, what breaks what, how to debug when something goes wrong three layers deep. That took actual time.
Curious how far others here have pushed it. Anyone shipped something with real backend complexity, not just a CRUD app or landing page?
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That's awesome, especially coming from a non-coding background.
I also think AI has changed where the difficulty is. Writing code is much easier now, but understanding architecture, and making good structural decisions still takes time. AI can help a lot, but it can't replace that experience yet.
@hosseinyazdi agree,
and I think that's exactly where my background saved me. 10 years as a 3D artist is 10 years of getting thrown a new plugin or pipeline tool overnight with zero idea how it works, and just sitting with it until it clicks. Turns out that's the same muscle architecture needs, you can't AI your way through "why does this break three layers down", you have to actually sit in it.
First month I was just typing what I wanted and hoping. Rewrote the chat screen twice because of it, started in SwiftUI, fully rewrote to UIKit once I hit walls SwiftUI could not handle. Voice was worse, weeks chasing a bug where the AI would go silent after one session or interrupt itself mid sentence. AI wrote plenty of the code in all of that, but it never once told me which of those decisions was the right one. That part was still on me.
And that's just a small drop of the difficulties I've run into.
Still moving forward.
this is wild man, 7 months from zero code to a shipped ios app with actual backend complexity... honestly impressive. i'm curious about the cloudflare workers part though, how was the learning curve on that compared to just using something like supabase or firebase?
@youliqn Honestly can't compare, this is the first backend I've ever built, never touched Supabase or Firebase. Picked Cloudflare Workers because someone recommended it for speed, then found out the hard way there's no dashboard holding your hand, you write everything yourself.
Most of my time went into figuring out the architecture, how the pieces should fit and talk to each other, that part was on me and it wasn't simple. The actual code got written by an AI agent, I mostly directed it and jumped in myself when something needed a closer look. Some bugs took days just because I didn't yet know what a normal one was supposed to look like.
No idea if it was the easy path or the hard one, it's just the only one I've walked.