June 5, 2026 · By Mike Barker
What’s the rule with posing a question in a headline, isn’t the answer always yes? You absolutely should learn SwiftUI if you plan to prototype or build an app with AI. The real question is, how much do you need to learn?
Well most designers weren’t ever going to learn every aspect of SwiftUI, not unless you’re planning on becoming a developer (and it sounds like being a developer now means using AI as well). The key is to learn just enough. And how much is “just enough” SwiftUI? Short answer: it depends. Long answer: enough to be able to vaguely understand what’s going on in the code.
This of course sounds like the answer is to go and complete several SwiftUI tutorials—which is worth doing and I could suggest either the ones on this site or many other tutorials—however there is another way. Use an LLM, especially the one writing your app.
One approach could be to skip every tutorial and jump into asking an LLM to write your app, then for you to read the code. And chances are if you’re reading this article you already have some understanding of what SwiftUI is and how it works. But maybe you don’t, maybe you know what SwiftUI is but not how it works or what any of the lines of code mean, and that’s fine—you’re in a great place to start, except of course you need somewhere to start! Ask your LLM of choice to explain how to install and setup Xcode, give you a tour of Xcode and a sample project from scratch, and a tutorial on the basics of SwiftUI.
How else can you use AI to not only code your app for you, but also explain how the code works:
1. Ask an LLM for a contextual tutorial
The difference between asking for a contextual tutorial and doing one of Apple’s tutorials, is that you can ask for explanations scoped to your app. Instead of “explain SwiftUI modifiers,” you ask “explain how modifiers work using the code you just wrote for my app.” The context makes it stick far better. However the risk is that LLMs sometimes over-explain or teach patterns you won’t actually encounter in your specific project so beware to ask for simple responses.
2. Inline comments in the code
Ask the LLM to include comments in the code it writes explaining every line of code. Sure this is worth trying, although it’s more nuanced than it sounds. There’s a spectrum here—you can ask for comments at different levels of granularity. “Explain what each block does” is different from “explain every line.” The sweet spot is probably asking for comments on anything that isn’t obvious SwiftUI boilerplate—so yes, skip the import SwiftUI and var body: some View lines, but comment anything involving state management, data flow, or non-obvious modifiers. (And if you don’t know what those three topics are, start by asking a chat bot to explain what they are and how they work in SwiftUI). What will this look like? Comments on each line with context such as:
.foregroundColor(.blue) // makes the text blue
This approach will result in a very dense Swift file, even if the LLM formats the code nicely. You might want to try it a few times to see if you can learn SwiftUI this way, and over time maybe you don’t need every comment included. You can always ask the LLM to explain individual lines of code like in option 1.
3. Asking for documentation alongside the code
This approach is underrated and I think it’s the most practical for designers specifically. Ask for a short “how to modify this” guide alongside the code—something like “here are the five things you’re most likely to want to change and exactly where in the code to change them.” That’s more useful than understanding every line, because it maps directly to design decisions.
Other approaches
Ask the LLM to make a change, but also ask it to explain what it changed and why, ideally pointing to specific lines. This is how you learn from the iterations you’re already doing rather than treating each change as a black box. It also helps diagnose the problem you described — where the change wasn’t quite right — because you can actually see what was interpreted differently.
Another approach, and this might work if you want to make the code changes yourself—learn through doing. After getting code written, paste it back in and ask “what would I need to understand about SwiftUI to make minor visual changes to this myself?” That surfaces only the relevant concepts, not a full curriculum on SwiftUI, and as you explain the visual changes you need, you’ll get a deeper understanding of how SwiftUI is working.