Over the last 6 months, I’ve been tinkering with AI coding assistants. My day job at Benchling has given me some decent exposure to some tools, but I wanted to know: how well do these tools perform when building from scratch?

So I gave myself a challenge: go from idea to live iOS app in under a month, using only AI coding assistants.

On day one, I opened a blank Xcode project, and on day 17 my app was live in the App Store. With only a few free hours each week, that was <24 hrs of real work at the keyboard. AI generated & debugged well over 90% of the code, and I guided and filled in a few gaps.

The app itself is simple. I live by Slack’s reminders in my work life, and wanted something like that for my personal notes. So I built graynotes, a lightweight notes + reminders app that syncs across devices.

This project wasn’t really about the app itself; it was about proving I could take a small idea from zero to shipped using only AI coding assistants, and seeing what I learned along the way.

I wanted to share this initial note to get some good momentum going, but I’m hoping to share a few more posts about some of my key takeaways, eg:

• Where I saw the AI assistants struggle, and what they did well
• How the different tools compared for various tasks (Claude, Codex, Gemini)
• What I’m hoping to build next!

In the meantime, check out the app if you want to see what I built (or if you need simple reminder app like me).