AI is changing a lot of things, and programming is one of them. You only need to look at the assortment of AI coders and the sort of things they can do to see that you don’t necessarily know how to learn to code, though it can certainly help.
Learning programming isn’t just about understanding the languages you use to conjure digital goods out of nothing. It’s also about learning how things fit together, and deciphering the order and management of what comes first and then follows. It’s why learning programming skills is sometimes bigger than programming itself, and it could explain why something heading into a large computer event in the middle of this year hasn’t excluded AI from its use.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference will likely be on for the middle of the year again, and just like it has before and every year, there’s a competition for young people keen to show off their skills in Apple’s Xcode development platform.
But what makes this year different is that Apple now supports the Anthropic Claude and OpenAI coding AI platforms directly in Xcode, and that means AI could be doing some of the coding, if not all. It’s a shift that could make apps more expansive or even less human-centric, though it’s also one where AI is allowed.
AI tools may be used to assist with specific tasks of your project, provided that all usage is fully disclosed. Through their submissions, participants are expected to demonstrate significant individual contributions and technical understanding of their app playground, and skills like problem-solving, impactfulness of the solution, creativity, user experience and design, and use of appropriate tools, and technologies.
That means if you happen to be a young developer, you can use AI to make your app for Apple’s competition, but you do need to state what you’ve done. You also need to make sure it works before you press the shiny “submit” button, because any app that doesn’t work is immediately disqualified.
Folks who win also get invited to Cupertino to spend with Apple during the whole Worldwide Developers Conference, which makes it potentially a big prize for young people interested in getting a big break in the coding world. They’ll only have two weeks to get it sorted, though, with submissions set to close on February 28.
