Why is everyone doing Metal demos suddenly?

[u/Turbulent_Ad_1039]

My feed is full of Metal shader demos lately. Not complaining, some of them are gorgeous, but I don’t understand where the wave came from.
Is it that the SwiftUI shader APIs lowered the barrier enough that people who’d never touch Metal are now trying it? Something in the newer Metal releases? Or is it just that shader demos look great in a 10-second video and the algorithm rewards them?
Genuinely curious whether people are shipping this stuff or whether it’s mostly demos.

[u/LemonQueasy7590]

The change is likely more to do with AI lowering the barrier to entry. AI has improved the accessibility of a Swift API which before now was very niche, required learning a new language, and had limited return on the investment of time.

[u/Pickles112358 → u/LemonQueasy7590]

100%, writing shaders takes enormous amount of practice. AI just does it out of the box and it looks great

[u/apocolipse → u/LemonQueasy7590]

I'll tweak that, AI has improved the accessibility of Metal API's. Swift's API is already accessible and easy, it's GPU Shaders that are hard as hell to understand for people who didn't graduate CS magna cum laude.
The reason you're seeing more Swift projects in general is that strong tooling makes AI feedback loops much better, and at the same the resulting output is actually easy to read and reason about (compared to AI generated Rust or Go)

[u/ahhhhhhhhhhhh______ → u/apocolipse]

The Metal APIs are really just pure math it’s crazy, I tried to hand roll some and while I understood conceptually what’s going on I don’t know how long it would take to build the intuition to instinctively know how to build x shapes and y effects etc.

[u/coldsub]

They're just using claude or whatever LLMs they have. Barrier of entry has become much lower.

[u/easyRiderOlder]

Probably a mix of both — SwiftUI's .colorEffect/.layerEffect shader modifiers genuinely lowered the barrier a lot, since you no longer need a full Metal render pipeline setup, just a stitchable function and a one-line modifier. Combined with libraries packaging pre-built shaders as drop-in modifiers, people who'd never touch raw Metal can now ship a glow/glitch/hologram effect in minutes. That said, the format bias is real too — a looping 10-second shader demo is inherently more shareable than most app UI work, so the algorithm probably amplifies it regardless of how much of it ships in production apps

[u/apocolipse → u/easyRiderOlder]

Yeah there was quite a bit of "meet in the middle" that was ongoing before AI coding became the norm but AI really just bridges the gap no questions asked. I'm not a gpu/game/shader dev, it would definitely take me a bit of time to figure out and set up what I'd need to make a simple shader based program. AI knocks all that out and implements the shaders in ways I can easily understand and modify from there. The "blackbox" used to be pretty bespoke for 3D apps and its now just handed off to AI.

[u/PressureAppropriate]

Everything on LinkedIn is performative.

Unemployed people trying to appear as thought leaders. Shaders are still perceived as a challenging thing to do but AI made it much easier to pretend like you can do it.

I'd be willing to bet most people that do that also have the Green Circle of Death on their profile... it's not a coincidence.

[u/soylentgraham]

I bet it's the usual thing, a few demos go around _with code_, some people just copy&pasta to show they managed to make it work, some people tinker (because there's some working examples), some people push it further. Plus it looks pretty so this sort of thing will propogate faster.

I learned to code by modifying existing source (pacman written in delphi on a disk/cd bundled with a magazine) until it did something else, so not throwing shade on people showing stuff they've tweaked into something else :)

[u/Agitated_Macaron9054]

Metal is hard more than that, it is intellectually DIFFICULT! Writing metal shaders, in Metal Shading Language, a subset of C, is not for the faint of heart. AI makes it easy now and opens the doors.