How good was the process?

I've had GPT3.5 teach me how to make a watchOS application to control a BLE device, and after a couple evenings I have one working on my watch right now.

On the bright side, it gave some concrete hands-on guidance that I just wasn't been able to get from Apple documentation. It quickly gave me enough pointers to make things click in my head. While I've never wrote a single line for any Apple ecosystem before, I have a fair amount of experiences in various other niches, so I just needed a crash-course introduction showing me the ropes until I start to see the similarities with things I already know about - and it gave me exactly what I wanted. Unlike beginner "write your first app" blog articles, this crash course was tailored specifically to my requirements, which is incredibly helpful.

However, on the downside, the code it wrote was awful, lacking any design. It gave me enough to get familiar with Swift syntax and how to setup CoreBluetooth, but the overall architecture was non-existent - just some spaghetti that kind-of worked (save for some bugs that were easier to fix on my own than explain to GPT) in my described happy scenario. It was like a junior developer would've grabbed some pieces from StackOverflow. In my attempts to bring things to order, I've hit a knowledge cutoff barrier (it has no clue about latest Swift with new its async syntax or Xcode 14 specifics - as a few things were moved around) and heavy hallucinations (ChatGPT actively trying to refer to various classes and methods that never existed).

Still, I'm impressed. Not a replacement for a developer, but definitely a huge boon. Wonder what others' experiences and opinions are.

My experience was similar. I am most comfortable coding in python, and my html/css/js skills are not strong. I don't have the patience to stay current with frontend tools or to bash my way through all the stack overflow searching that it would require for me to code frontend stuff.

So with that context, I was able to have chatgpt do all of the heavy lifting of building a webapp. I was able to build my wish list of features like immersive reading with synchronized sound and word highlighting. Stuff that I probably wouldn't have had enough motivation to complete on my own.

But the architecture of the code is poor. It repeats itself and would be hard to maintain. I think much of this could be improved by spending more time asking gpt to refactor and restructure. The same way a senior developer might provide feedback to a junior dev's first coding project. I did some of this along the way, but that code base needs more if it were to be an ongoing project.

This deserves its own post, but that aside, please expand.

And take it from the perspective of ELI5 where one needs to basically set this up on a fresh install, what does it take?

The README in that repo tells the story of building that particular app. I recently got access to gpt-4, and the tooling I've built has become much more reliable. I will likely polish it up and put it onto GitHub sometime soon.