Practitioner (own blog/paper) New product
Solo developer ships a 20,000-line native macOS app, writing fewer than 1,000 lines by hand
Indragie Karunaratne, a Mac developer since 2008, shipped Context, a native SwiftUI app for debugging MCP servers, almost entirely with Claude Code. It was his first shipped side project in six years. He also had Claude write a 2,000-line Python release script covering code signing, notarisation, DMG packaging, Sparkle appcast and GitHub release.
The numbers (as reported)
| Codebase size | ~20,000 lines |
|---|---|
| Written by hand | <1,000 lines (author's estimate) |
| Release automation script | 2,000 lines of Python, written by Claude in a few hours of iteration |
| Tool cost | $200/month |
Facts
- Company / subject
- Indragie Karunaratne (independent developer)
- Tools
- Claude Code, Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Opus 4
- Codebase
- greenfield
- Work type
- New product
- Stack
- Swift, SwiftUI, macOS, Python
- Published
- 2025-07-01
- Last checked
- 2026-10-18
Caveats
No total build time given. Claude struggled with Swift Concurrency, tended to reach for legacy AppKit/Obj-C APIs, and couldn't drive the app UI to debug, so logs and screenshots had to be pasted in by hand. Needed detailed specs and planning to get past prototype quality. The author says he has no affiliation with Anthropic.