How I built Loops with AI
Loops is a notes app with friction on purpose. It holds your thinking and doesn't try to help. I built it over a few weeks of conversation with an AI.
Loops is a notes app for iOS, but that undersells it. It’s for thought loops, problems you have to work through yourself. It won’t answer you or remind you. It holds your thinking while you build the habit of thinking again, on exactly the kind of problem a chatbot can’t or shouldn’t solve for you.
I built it by talking to a chatbot.
Where it started
I didn’t start with a blank Xcode project. I started with a prototype file and notes from an earlier conversation, and dropped them into Claude Code with roughly: here’s what I have, keep the grid, and it needs a very high level of design craft. After that the whole process was conversation. I ran the app on my phone, took screenshots of what bothered me, pasted them back, and said what I saw.
Most of my messages weren’t instructions. They were reactions. “The text gets cut off in a way where it doesn’t look like there’s more beneath it.” “I don’t love how they sit on top of the keyboard, touching.” “It’s a little laggy now. Why?” That’s how a design review sounds, not how programming sounds, and it’s where I’m most useful.
The decisions that made it Loops
A few calls from those weeks I’d stand behind anywhere:
No blank page. An empty notes app gives you nothing to react to. Loops starts you with a sample loop already in progress, so the first thing you do is keep thinking instead of figuring out how to start.
Loops cool down. Every loop has a timer, 60 days and counting. Leave one alone long enough and it goes dormant. That’s the friction on purpose: if you’re not working on a thought, you should either come back to it or let it go.
Settings you feel. Partway through, I asked whether settings always need their own screen, or whether some could be felt through gestures and what you do. Alan Cooper called the settings screen the place designers dump the decisions they couldn’t make. Loops has almost no settings screen. The preferences are in how it behaves.
A way out. Notes apps tend to hoard. Loops can copy a whole loop, with its structure and context, into any other notes app. If your thinking outgrows the app, the app should hand it over.
One idea didn’t make it. I wanted a big interaction built on something only an iPhone can do, and my first try, an effect driven by the gyroscope, was too subtle to be worth it. I cut it.
What I learned
Building an app with no AI by using AI, the split of work matched the app’s idea exactly. The AI never got tired of anything with a right answer: layouts, keyboard handling, App Store setup, re-taking five screenshots against the latest build. The parts that make Loops what it is, the friction, the cooldowns, what should be a setting, didn’t have a right answer to look up. I had to sit with those.
The tool held my thinking while I worked through a problem it couldn’t solve for me, which is the whole pitch for Loops.
It came out on 22 September 2026. The app is in my work now.