Claude MAX includes Claude Code - a vibe coders paradise 🌴
Lets build an app real fast
As of 02.05.25 - Claude Code, Anthropic's famously good yet prohibitively expensive CLI Coding Agent has been bundled into the MAX, with two flavours, starting at 5x and 20x usage at $100 and $200 respectively.
We're going to test this out today and see how for $200 ($100 apple dev license, $100 Claude MAX) we can build and release an app to the iOS app store (pending approval) in 24 hours.
If you want to try this without spending $200, you can code exclusively through Cursor's free tier/trial and Claude's free account.
To develop for Apple you do need access to a Mac but you can experiment without paying for a full apple developer license. If you want a tutorial for this let me know in the chat bubble and I'll get around to it when i can :)
Firstly, why is this such a good deal? Well lets look at some anecdotes from reddit:
Okay, so is it really that good? Lets find out.
IDEA:
I've got a friend that DJ's and often needs to find the Tempo / BPM for the song that's playing.
There's some basic app's out there but after some brief research, they all seem either just to give a basic BPM or act more as a metronome.
So to differentiate our app we're going to add double and half time BPM values
(if you've ever mixed music you'll know the pain of 76 * 2 in a moment of panic)
EXPLORATION:
For me step 1 of vibe coding is vibe design (including iteration until an MVP brief and UI is achieved), then this creates your UI and technical brief.
The best way I've found to do this is using Claude's artefacts, you simply brief what you want, let it have some creative freedom and then give feedback and iterate.
You can view my chat for this project here, including vibe design, and vibe tech spec.
Something crucial we can't forget about is VIBE SECURITY. I'll talk about this more in the future but it's one of the biggest downfalls of AI assisted coding.
Luckily by developing for iOS, we offload essentially all security considerations to Apple (for this basic app), therefore the vibes are secure, and we don't really need to worry about it so much.
PLANNING:
Okay, so you've cooked up a UI that your happy with for your app - as in my example above, it might even be functional thanks to Claude's artefacts.
You are now ready to get a technical and UI spec to feed into Claude Code on desktop.
Amusingly, when AI generates timelines, it always generates reasonable and realistic human led timelines, so in my first spec we got the below:
This does not pass the vibe check, so we needed to give Claude a reminder:
And with that were off:
In the project plan it actually defined vibe coding quite beautifully, so lets capture that as "The Vibe Coding Manifesto"
EXCECUTION:
Now it's time to actually build. We set up a new blank Xcode project, initiate Claude Code, add the spec and let it cook until we're happy.
All in it took me 3 hours including logo creation, app store submission and feature refinement.
UPDATE: 03.05.25 - App rejected in review due to iPad usability - to resolve this I have enabled the iPad build (it was disabled - the reviewers didn't like the app at 2x with increased text size) & I have also improved some of the spacing and fixed some bugs that were found, +30 mins.
UPDATE: 04.05.25 - App is approved for the app store 🚀
REFLECTION:
In all honestly I vibe coded this badly, I committed to GIT too late and didn't rollback when errors and changes I didn't like happened.
If I had done this properly and followed the vibe coding principles, I reckon it could have been done in <1.5 hrs, but I got excited using Claude Code without each message costing me $5 and never hitting rate limits so it was a good test of Claude MAX and I regret nothing.
LEARNING:
I'll shortly post an article using the above Claude Code brief and build the app again cleaner and in tutorial form. Subscribe to be notified when this is live :)
If you've gotten this far then thanks for reading and coming along on this journey with me. If you want to see more content like this, subscribe below :)
I'm also offering 80% off for the first 50 subscribers 🎉 to the paid subscription, where I'll post more tutorials and will be open to support requested topics.
ciao x
🍋
Links & Resources (affiliate links may be included):
