Chris Ching

What to expect when you join CWC+?  Other than learning how to code, you’ll become a better version of yourself who knows what it means to work on something you’re passionate about.  Join CWC+ now with our ongoing Spring Sale and save $42 on your annual plan. Sale ends soon! cwc.to/spring2026 cwc.to/spring2026 cwc.to/spring2026

Michael tried to learn coding multiple times. Failed every time. Then he found CWC+, and now has 2 apps live on the App Store. You too can build your own app with the right guidance. Enjoy CWC+ at a discounted price of $198/year (save $42) Don't miss it! cwc.to/spring2026

Follow up... Hey everyone, thank you for all of your comments and kind words. Reading your emails, messages and your comments has made me realize that there's still a lot of people who genuinely want to learn the skill of coding. That's made me feel a lot better about the value of my work and it's reinvigorated my sense of duty. I'll continue to create coding tutorials :) Thank you!

Hey, it's Chris here. I don’t think I’ve posted anything publicly since December. So over 2 months of radio silence. Honestly, I hit a wall. AI got so good at building apps that I couldn’t help but feel like, “why bother?”. Whenever I sat down to work on coding tutorials, I felt like I was spending time on something that people wouldn’t find valuable. Like, why spend months learning Swift when Claude Code can write the whole thing in 10 minutes? That thought kind of broke me for a bit, and instead of posting through the confusion, I just stopped. So I threw myself into something I actually felt energized by: using AI to build iOS apps and figuring out how to turn them into real products. I've been deep in product development mode, working on my Tip Tracker and Daily Parent Affirmations app. Honestly, just trying to figure out the hardest part of the whole app game (which isn't the coding anymore). It's getting users, it's marketing, it's the whole business side that blindsides developers after they launch their app. Here's the thing I kept coming back to: building apps with AI is easy now and anyone can do it, but making a successful app is a completely different skill set. And I actually have experience here, it just didn't look like "app experience" at the time. When I started CodeWithChris from scratch, I had to learn SEO, email marketing, copywriting, how to build an audience, all of it over years. Turns out, that's exactly the game you play with apps too. Same game, different product. So the content is shifting a bit. You'll see more from me on AI coding (there's a better and worse way to do it and I want to share what's actually working for me), and more on the product development side, things like growing an app, getting users, figuring out monetization. (I’m not going to say that this is a permanent transition, but at the moment, it’s what’s interesting and energizing to me.) I'm not an expert in all of it, but I've been in the trenches and I'll share what I'm learning as I go. It feels a lot like the early days of CodeWithChris; Small team, figuring things out in real time, being a bit more personal about it all. I'm looking forward to that!

What do you think about these strategies? Follow for more tips and insights on coding with AI.

Number 3, a planning-based strategy  This goes back to pre-development where you need to define the app architecture first, and use AI to fill in small pieces, making you to always be in the driver’s seat.  A planning-based strategy also means you have to spend a lot of time on your requirements to reduce ambiguity and consider edge cases for your app.

I just built multiple vibe-coded or AI-coded apps this year, and I can confidently say that maintaining them is incredibly difficult.  But here are 3 strategies that have been reducing errors for me, and I hope they’ll help you too:

Always an easy recommend from me:

Quality of results: With all that said, how do they actually perform? Well, I asked both of them to build a breathing exercise app without any instruction for the UI. Left image is from Claude Code. Right one is from Cursor, which the audience preferred. How about you?

Considerations: Cursor has a free plan, whereas Claude Code needs a paid plan (starting at $17 usd/month) Claude Code has a weekly limit and a session limit which resets each 5 hrs. If you hit the session limit, you can wait until it resets in 5 hours.

So last week I just hosted a stream about Claude Code and compared it against Cursor. Here’s what I found.

Learn how to randomize card values, calculate the winner, update the user interface, and deploy the app on your iPhone or iPad.

In the final lesson of our eight-day beginner series, we complete the war card game app! youtube.com/watch?v=olxOUG…

So one of my students left this comment in our community. If you’re in a similar situation, here’s what I think:  AI is everywhere and it’s pretty much unavoidable.  So if you’re facing frustration and constant roadblocks, I can imagine how tempting it is to just ask AI to do it. Our brains are great at making justifications for shortcuts because it’s a survival instinct to conserve energy and to avoid pain!  The problem here is when AI does the heavy lifting for you because there’s not much learning happening. Now I’m currently recreating my iOS Foundations course, and this is especially interesting to me. Because so far, AI can be used to help us learn faster. Which means it all depends on how you use it. And such a technique for using AI to learn is: prompt AI as if it’s your instructor sitting beside you. In traditional learning, an instructor would never write the code for you. They would only lead you towards the answer or explain concepts to you. So, all you have to do is replicate this experience by asking AI to guide you through the thought process and specifically ask it NOT to write any code for you. If you want to learn how to seek answers, you can even ask AI to point you towards the right resources so that you can do the work yourself. But do note that the act of properly asking AI itself is a skill itself. Anyone in the same boat?

Which AI model builds the best iOS apps? My results testing Gemini 3 Pro, Opus 4.5 and Composer 1: youtube.com/watch?v=8bCmJY…