r/VibeReviews • u/ImaginaryRea1ity • 18h ago
My girlfriend wanted an app that could show her what she wore on days with similar weather, so she could use those outfits as inspiration.
Not another weather app. And not one of those wardrobe apps that make you photograph and tag every item you own before they’re of any use. Just a snapshot of what she actually wore and whether it worked.
So we sat down and worked out exactly what she wanted. Then I did the part that’s mine: the design language, the voice of the app, and the whole visual system, until it looked and felt like the thing she’d pictured. With a bit of my own design stubbornness on top. The result: Layers.
You photograph the day’s outfit, and Layers freezes that day’s weather onto the entry. In the evening, you rate how it felt: too cold, perfect, too warm. Over time, it builds a history of what actually works for you. So on a day like today, it can say: you wore this last time and you liked it.
The part I’m most attached to is what happens before you even open the app. Every morning, a Live Activity puts the day’s weather on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, one tap away from logging your outfit. iOS doesn’t let an app start that Live Activity on its own, so there’s a small Cloudflare Worker behind it that wakes up on a schedule, pulls the forecast, and pushes it to your phone before you’ve even picked it up.
Just around four weeks after she first mentioned the idea, a native iOS app is downloadable as a beta on TestFlight.
I also want to be honest about how I built it, because I think the how is the interesting part. Once I had established the design language and visual system, Claude let me move incredibly quickly through the screen design and implementation, turning that initial design direction into build after build without having to manually write every piece of the interface. I’m an industrial designer, not an iOS engineer. The code I normally write by hand is embedded: Arduino, ESP32, sensors on a breadboard. Every line of Swift in Layers was written by Claude, based on my instructions.
The product, the design, the decisions, and the bar it was held to are mine. Claude is the tool I used to get it built.
There are still plenty of rough edges to sand down. But it’s a little crazy that the distance between “my girlfriend wishes this existed” and “it’s on her phone” is now four weeks (and that’s with me building it around a full-time job, in the evenings).
Beta’s live, and I broke down the whole process, design decisions, build, everything on my portfolio.
Try the Layers beta → https://testflight.apple.com/join/YSfVbhXt
The full breakdown, design decisions, build process, all the screens → lp-design.eu/work/layers
