Descriptions:
iOS developer Chris Raroque documents a week of solo development across four apps — Amy (calorie tracking), Ellie (daily planning), and Luna (budgeting) — using Claude Code backed by Anthropic’s newly released Claude Opus 4.5 inside Cursor. The video is a candid engineering diary rather than a polished tutorial, offering honest assessments of where the model delivered and where previous AI models had previously failed.
The standout result is a calendar layout algorithm for Ellie’s time-boxing feature: after multiple prior models produced unreadable results, Opus 4.5 delivered a Google Calendar-quality layout in two to three prompts over roughly two and a half hours. A second breakthrough came with drag-and-drop gesture handling — after discovering that SwiftUI’s default drag API offers limited animation control, Chris had Claude Code port the entire system to UIKit, resolving all six simultaneous gesture conflicts within about two hours. The same UIKit insight was immediately applied to interactive charts in Luna, eliminating scroll conflicts with no additional iteration.
The week also covered migrating Ellie’s Notion integration to webhooks — a refactor that had been fragile since its original hand-coded implementation due to Notion’s extensive field schema. Throughout, Opus 4.5 is evaluated not through formal benchmarks but by direct comparison against the same hard problems that stalled previous AI coding sessions, giving working developers a practical data point for model selection decisions.
📺 Source: Chris Raroque · Published January 05, 2026
🏷️ Format: Workflow Case Study
