shive.ly

I am not an iOS developer, though I do a lot of dabbling with various languages, frameworks, etc. This week, I shipped my first app — PetPilot — to the App Store using Claude Code, and have two more that I'll hopefully share soon.

PetPilot is a free (no, like actually free: no in-app purchases, no ads) app to coordinate pet care in your household.

For the last two years my wife and I have been using an app to track care tasks for our golden retrievers, Pierogi and Pickle. The app we were using is “free”, but has ads and feels pretty dated/hasn't been well maintained. I decided to build my own version that optimizes for what we care about: low friction/one touch logging of things like feeding and potty breaks. (Instead of a screenshot of my app, I'm paying the cute dog tax on this post.)

I've never built an iOS app before and I barely know a lick of Swift, but this was a great experiment in using Claude to build something real. I originally started this project in July, but hit a major roadblock: a key feature is iCloud syncing/sharing so you can see each other's updates, but Opus 4.1 couldn't seem to get the cloud sync features to work after many attempts (and again, I am a very novice iOS dev.)

However, after Opus 4.5 came out I picked the project back up and in just a few hours everything was working great. It's almost a cliche at this point, but things are evolving quickly in the AI coding space.

If you're interested, you can download PetPilot here.

I hope if you decide to check it out that you find it useful.