Yeah, I'm not a Swift expert by any means - this is literally something I spent a few days on - but this in particular:
> One is that Swift has changed massively since it came out and huge swathes of examples and articles and such online, that LLMs are trained on, are out of date and thus pollute the training set.
100% jibes with my experience. The amount of times it would generate code using a deprecated API, or some older mechanism, or mix an older idiom with a newer one... well, it was constant really.
And a lot of Googling when I was fixing everything up manually drew me toward this same conclusion: that high quality, up to date information on Swift was in relatively short supply compared to other languages. Couple that with a lower volume of content across all Swift versions and you end up with far from great training data leading to far from great outputs.
> Apple developer docs are largely sequestered behind JavaScript that makes them hard for scrapers to parse.
Yeah, and honestly - even if there's a solution here - the documentation isn't that great either. Certainly not compared with .NET, Ruby, Python, TypeScript, etc.
If I were a vibe coder I'd certainly avoid Swift like the plague.
(Btw, this isn't a knock on Swift itself: as a language I didn't mind it, although I did notice when debugging that the Objective C underpinnings of many APIs are often on display.)
> One is that Swift has changed massively since it came out and huge swathes of examples and articles and such online, that LLMs are trained on, are out of date and thus pollute the training set.
100% jibes with my experience. The amount of times it would generate code using a deprecated API, or some older mechanism, or mix an older idiom with a newer one... well, it was constant really.
And a lot of Googling when I was fixing everything up manually drew me toward this same conclusion: that high quality, up to date information on Swift was in relatively short supply compared to other languages. Couple that with a lower volume of content across all Swift versions and you end up with far from great training data leading to far from great outputs.
> Apple developer docs are largely sequestered behind JavaScript that makes them hard for scrapers to parse.
Yeah, and honestly - even if there's a solution here - the documentation isn't that great either. Certainly not compared with .NET, Ruby, Python, TypeScript, etc.
If I were a vibe coder I'd certainly avoid Swift like the plague.
(Btw, this isn't a knock on Swift itself: as a language I didn't mind it, although I did notice when debugging that the Objective C underpinnings of many APIs are often on display.)