The Mental Faculty — Blog

We’re in a strange in-between time when it comes to LLMs and code.

Earlier this year Andrej Karpathy published a little thing called autoresearch , and it has been rattling around in my head ever since.

TLDR; I rewrote Ensembles — my 13-year-old Objective-C sync framework — in Swift 6, using Claude Code .

This post is the result of a lot of thinking.

TLDR; I’m launching a new Swift framework called Forked for working with shared data, both on a single device, and across many.

And so we arrive at the final station.

In our continuing series on Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) in Swift, we have so far introduced a number of types, beginning with the very basic register type, and working up to multi-value containers like sets and dictionaries .

It’s an old chestnut that Swift developers love to sink their teeth into: Should you force unwrap optionals?

In the previous installment of this ongoing series on Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) in Swift, I introduced you to tombstones and Lamport counts, in constructing a replicating set.

Other Posts in Series Last time we introduced our first replicating collection, an add-only set.

Other Posts in Series In the last post I introduced you to the first replicating type in this series: a register.

Source code for this series is in this GitHub repo .

Other Posts in Series If you read any of my earlier posts here, you were probably left wondering what the name of the blog was all about.

I want to finish off this series with a post on troubleshooting, and I’m not going to sugar coat it — there’s lots of trouble to shoot.

In the previous posts I alluded to some exceptional circumstances that can arise and need to be handled in a production app.

Having covered Core Data syncing via iCloud from a high level, in this post I want to introduce a simple test app, which will be extended over the coming weeks.

Before you think about the fine details of syncing your Core Data via iCloud, you need to answer some big questions: How are you going to enable and disable iCloud in your app, and how are you going to seed iCloud with data when syncing gets enabled?

Apple’s documentation for Core Data syncing via iCloud offers very little insight into how it actually works.

There can be no doubt that iCloud is an important part of Apple’s future.