iOS Dev Weekly Issue 763 is a game changer

I’ve been reading iOS Dev Weekly for years now. Before this past May, the newsletter was written by Dave Verwer who I’d emailed a handful of times (he responded!) and always had great commentary about the state of the iOS development world. Sometimes, he’d be honest and note he didn’t have much to say that week, but he always brought interesting thoughts and ideas to the table.

Since May, the newsletter was handed over to Mobile Sessions who would take the helm and keep it going. I’ve been skimming the latest issues, as it helps to read about new frameworks or blog posts from the community to keep up with what’s happening on iOS. There’s a rotation of writers who have been taking turns on the newsletter for each week. It wasn’t Dave, but I still felt like I was connecting with people in the community.

The latest issue of iOS Dev Weekly, though, was just riddled with AI/LLM-isms that kept irking me:

A new set of App Store marketing assets arrives this autumn, and the work is design work rather than engineering, which means it probably isn’t on anyone’s board yet.

Ugh, this “and the work is…” just keeps showing up.

Most of us open Instruments, look at the call tree, and quietly close it again. The hierarchy is honest but it buries the answer.

And this “quietly” and “X is Y but Z” pattern as well.

And even in the And Finally…, which, IMO is an easy way to just bust something out by hand:

Somewhere a product manager shouted ship it, nobody asked a follow-up question, and CarPlay is now in a pontoon boat while some automakers are still workshopping their objections.

Oi. This “nobody asked X” pattern that AI loves so much and is so dramatic about.

Looking back at previous issues by Juan Marin, and Issue 759 was also by him. Still pretty AI/agentic.

I’m not against agents writing and helping to write (though, I know some folks are adamantly against any use of AI in writing), but IMO this is a real sloppy use of it. I read enough Claude-isms all day from my agents in Claude Code, and it’s already exhausting there. When I’m reading a newsletter like iOS Dev Weekly, I’m expecting more than just the first pass of what gets spit out. I think it’s lazy and really leaves a bad taste in my mind. A little editing of the original draft can easily clean these up and give the writer a bit more of their own voice and make it lot more interesting to read.

BTW: for my own blog here, I don’t use AI for writing/drafting, but I do have it help with proofreading/editing sometimes. For some of my projects, I do have it help out with marketing copy, but even there I steer it with my own voice guidelines and give a bit more personality/context than just its default generic style of prose.