Greg.bot grows up and becomes an app.

Hey y’all,

Sorry for the inconsistency in updating this blog, but there’s a good reason for it—I’ve built an app!

Some of you might remember my first blog post from a couple of months ago, where I described using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet to code a life coach-style chatbot that you could access in your browser. While that was the right idea, it was the wrong medium. If I really wanted to reach people and help them, it needed to be an app.

So, I built an app! I had no prior knowledge of Swift (the coding language for building iOS apps on the iPhone), but I figured Claude would. And it did!

I told Claude to look at the code for the web app I’d made, which had been stored in the Project Knowledge, and instructed it to convert the web app into a Swift app. Of course, it did this really well.

In retrospect, these steps seem obvious, but the handholding was helpful at the time.

From there, I essentially trialed-and-errored my way forward. I would dictate what I wanted in terms of design and functionality, and Claude would either nail it or come close. I’d then continue refining until it was exactly how I envisioned.

The exciting part of the AI era is that an average Joe like me can have a vision for a product and quickly turn it into a minimum viable product, which reinforces their resolve to build something greater.

I had to tune and de-cringe Greg.bot repeatedly until I actually enjoyed our conversations.

As Claude and AI in general continue to improve, what will distinguish developers—or “prompters”—moving forward is their instincts for taste, design, and functionality.

I used to lament not being around for the dawn of the internet, but now I’m excited because this really feels like the most thrilling time to be alive—at least in tech. I can’t wait to see what emerges over the next year, much less the next decade.

This project took about a month of part-time prompting back and forth with Claude Sonnet and Haiku to get to a version I really liked. The App Store upload process, however, was super frustrating—I navigated 18 rejections for ticky-tack issues. That part took another month. But I gained tons of valuable experience and could probably do it again in 2–3 weeks if I worked on it full-time.

If you want to try out the app, give it a download and let me know what you think! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/greg-bot-your-ai-life-coach/id6739238591