I work a lot with the cruise ship industry, and one of the more interesting challenges we run into is that often there are user-facing systems that have to work without an Internet connection. I’ve designed applications that are supposed to work in a mine, or on a plane, and then later sync with the cloud, but building something that might not have a web connection for three days through the fjords  is a little different.

We’ve been looking into sending local notifications without any Internet access at all – from a server installed locally on the ship, to an app on a crew member or guest’s personal device. The basic idea is that an app, installed on the phone or tablet, can send a “local push notification” or “background push notification” to the operating system. Even if the app is not in the foreground, or the phone is asleep, the notification should wake the device up, and present the user with a message. This is exactly the same as a standard push notification (think Facebook or calendar notifications), but instead of using Apple’s push server, you are using an app itself to send the message. The problem is how do you trigger the app to do something in the background? The app has to wake up in the background, contact the local server, check for messages, download any available message or content, and then alert the user if it found anything.

There are a couple of ways to trigger a background application to do something for you. The two we looked into for our purposes were “Location Updates” and “Background Fetch”

Our limitation here is obviously the cellular modem will be turned off (Airplane mode) because there either is no cell tower around, or you don’t want your passengers paying international data roaming fees. There are other ways to trigger a background app action, but they mainly involve things like plugging in headphones, managing VoIP calls, and mainly Internet-requiring services. You can read more about the available options here: http://apple.co/29288f1

Option 1. The background fetch function appears to be the best option for this kind of app. This is something we’ve used in the past, but never had to worry about sans-Internet issues. The way background fetch works is the operating system puts your app into a queue of other apps asking for background services. The queue is processed based on which apps have the best efficiency. Apple does not really go into details, but it appears that the less data and the less battery your application uses in the background, the more frequently your app will be given background privileges (http://apple.co/291iAkd).

However, the problem here was we didn’t know exactly how efficient the application will be before we build it and start tuning it. So we built a prototype. While plugged in to a charger, it was able to receive messages every 10-12 minutes. Unplugged it was able to check the server only ever 20 minutes.

Option 2 (Augmentation). So in order to augment the inconsistent/unknown response time of the background fetch, we looked at the location updates. Location Updates are a way of triggering a background function when the device detects “a significant location change”. The idea is that if the phone detects movement that is “significant” (whatever that means) it will trigger your app. This is not exactly well documented but through some research and some experimentation it appears that “significant” means 1000 meters. This would be perfect for us, because seeing as while on a cruise you are probably moving 10 meters a second, we could have the app update every minute and a half. That would be an additional update cycle to cut down on the 10-minute maximum update cycle. The problem is that this measurement is tracked using the cellular antenna, and not the GPS! After a fair amount of banging our head on the desk, we gave up on Option 2.

As far as I know, planes and cruise ships are going to be relegated to the notification abyss for the time being. Without reliable Internet access, devices can’t get timely push notifications. The limitations on local push notifications while in airplane mode might be ok for notifying crew about training drills and passengers about dinner times, but it would not be reliable enough for emergency notifications.

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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The State of AI-Coded Software, May 2025

In Software, Technology

I’ll probably regret writing this. At the very least, I’ll cringe reading it in a few months. But here we are.

Lately, we’ve been getting a wave of client requests asking us to evaluate software they built using AI tools. These aren’t engineers. These are business folks using increasingly powerful AI products to try and build functioning systems. And to be completely honest, the results are both impressive and a bit alarming.

People are building whole applications on their own. Backends, frontends, user interfaces, even some database logic. Sometimes they even look good. These are smart people who don’t know how to code but have managed to produce working systems.

The problems show up immediately when we start reviewing the internals. The code is usually a mess. In many cases, it would be extremely difficult to maintain or extend. And if you need to move that code from the platform it was created in to a cloud provider like AWS, you’re going to hit a wall. These platforms wrap everything in layers of scaffolding that make portability a nightmare.

Security is worse. We’ve found plaintext credentials scattered across files. We’ve seen SQL injection vulnerabilities that shouldn’t even be possible in modern frameworks. We’ve seen structural issues that would get flagged in a freshman CS class.

Despite all that, what people are creating are legitimate prototypes. They’re functional. They run. But when you’ve put a few weeks into building something, and you show it to a software engineer, it’s hard to hear that your shiny new thing needs to be rebuilt from scratch.

I want to be clear. I am not anti-AI. Almost everyone at my company uses AI tools every day. We use Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, Claude, and more. We build out frontends with tools like v0 and Lovable. These tools have changed how we work.

Some of our engineers report productivity improvements of 30 to 40 percent. That’s not a rounding error. That is a major shift. But they are still writing the code. They are reviewing it. They are checking for performance, clarity, security, and maintainability. They are not letting the tools decide architecture. They are using AI like they use autocomplete or linters, but with more power behind it.

This is also where expectations need to be adjusted. These systems will not save you 90 percent on development. They will not let you skip engineering altogether. But if they save you 30 percent, that’s a real gain. Imagine you’re building a house. The general contractor says it’s going to be $500,000. You tell them you already did the blueprints, filled out all the permits, and figured out the site plan using some AI tools. If they came back and said, “Alright, I’ll knock 30 percent off,” that would be the best deal of your life. That’s where we are today with AI-generated software. A solid start. A real value. Not a replacement.

For me personally, AI has made it fun to write code again. I haven’t been a working programmer in over a decade, and most modern toolchains are enough to scare me off. Now, with the right assistance, I can build something without getting stuck on Docker configs and dependency mismatches. That’s a big deal.

In the startup world, AI-first development is everywhere. Most of the current Y Combinator batch is using AI tools to write the bulk of their code. But those teams are highly technical. These are engineers using better tools, not tools replacing engineers.

So for non-developers using AI to build products, here are three things you should keep in mind:

  1. These tools are great for building prototypes. If you build something yourself, you will understand it better and will be a better partner to your engineering team. That matters.
  2. These tools can help you build usable frontend components. You probably won’t want to go live with them, but they can get you close enough to work with a real development team.
  3. If your app is small, non-critical, doesn’t store sensitive data, and lives entirely in its native platform, you can probably keep it running. That’s fine for internal use or personal projects.

One day, you’ll be able to speak an app into existence and deploy it with a voice command. It will be fast, secure, and beautiful. But today, you still need an experienced software engineer to check your work before you send real data through it. That’s just where we are right now.

The upside is huge. We can now get experts from other domains to build working prototypes and test ideas without needing an engineering team on day one. That’s powerful. But if your product is going to handle sensitive data or support real users, bring in someone who knows what they’re doing. Not because the AI is bad. Because the stakes are high.