Guest intro
Felix Lebedinzew is a Berlin-based product designer, formerly at Revolut and now Head of Design at Getsafe, focused on building simple, human digital products.
Vibe Jam is hosted by Elena Avramenko co-founder of Modaal — an AI app builder for native iOS and Android apps.
What’s inside
What happens when a product designer stops handing ideas to developers and tries to ship the whole thing alone?
In this episode of Vibe Jam, I speak with Felix about building Still, a native iOS app written in Swift and shipped with the help of Claude Code. What started as a holiday experiment quickly became a proof point: with the right workflow, a product designer can go from idea to App Store without starting in Figma, without a full team, and without waiting for engineering capacity.
Felix walks through how he used GPT to structure the product idea into a strong starting prompt, then used Claude Code to generate the first working Xcode project in minutes. From there, the real work began: testing in simulator, prompting screen by screen, refining interactions, shaping visual details in words, and pushing toward something that felt truly native.
We also get into the practical side: why he chose Swift over React Native [#the- power-of-native], how he handled design without relying on Figma, what broke along the way, why GitHub and regression testing matter much earlier than most beginners think, and what App Store publishing actually looks like when AI can help with the answers but not do the release for you.
It’s a great episode for designers, makers, and anyone curious about what “vibe coding” looks like when the goal is not just to prototype, but to ship something real for mobile.
What Felix built
Still — a minimal native iOS reflection app that gives users one sentence per day and lets them capture a short daily check-in.
Tools used
Claude Code - for building simple Swift app
Chat GPT - for structuring the idea and helping with release form answers
Xcode + iPhone simulator - for testing
GitHub - for version control
Process
Start with the idea in words → use GPT to structure it into one strong prompt → generate the first Xcode project in Claude Code → test immediately in simulator → refine screen by screen through prompting → add design decisions directly in prompts → publish to the App Store.
Key themes in this episode
Why Felix now sees vibe coding as a real skill, not just a playground
How a designer can build without starting in Figma
Why native iOS on Swift mattered for quality, haptics, widgets, and system feel
The hidden pain points: lost versions, weak debugging, broken regressions
Why distribution becomes the next problem once building gets easy
Links
Follow Felix on LinkedIn: Felix Lebedinzew - https://www.linkedin.com/in/felix-lebedinzew/
Get the App: Still – Daily Sentence - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/still-daily-sentence/id6757303042
A note from the host. The pain points Felix hit — lost versions, weak debugging, regressions nobody caught — are the reason we built Modaal: an AI app builder for native iOS and Android apps that runs your own agent (Claude Code included) inside a workflow with architecture decided up front, a plan you approve before each feature, and the Xcode project on your disk. Free plan: one project, unlimited prompts.
