AI is making the nice version worth building

There is a particular kind of software improvement that lives forever in the backlog. Everyone agrees it would be better. Nobody can quite justify doing it. The Android app that deserves as much attention as the iPhone version. The awkward interaction that takes three taps because fixing it means unpicking a shared component. The little utility that would save a colleague twenty minutes every Friday, provided somebody first spends a fortnight building it. They accumulate under perfectly sensible headings: later, nice to have, not worth the effort. Eventually, we stop seeing them as choices. They become what the software is like. Shopify moving its mobile apps from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin makes me wonder how many of those decisions deserve another look. I have built native iOS and Android apps, done plenty of cross-platform work with Xamarin, and co-founded a startup where we used Ionic for both mobile platforms. I was doing this long before LLMs could do useful…

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