Hey, I’m Martin, industrial master electrician. Not a software developer. I started teaching myself Swift back in November. The basics were alright, but pretty quickly I ended up trying Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity and whatever else is out there. Tried them all.
And now, 3 months later, I’ve written almost 65,000 lines of code across 260+ files for Sketrix. My own ECAD app for macOS and iPad.
Sounds crazy, but it’s also a ton of fun.
Why am I even doing this?
I switched from Windows to Mac and wanted to use EPLAN at home. Problem: only works with Parallels, it’s slow, just annoying. So I thought: let’s see what these AI tools can actually do.
And well… it’s way more complicated than you’d think.
“Hey Claude, build me ECAD like EPLAN” — yeah, that doesn’t work.
A todo app? Sure, AI builds that in 10 minutes. I even have one inside Sketrix for my project management. But ECAD with autoconnection, wire management and page structure? Forget it.
What I’ve learned
You need patience and a technical understanding of how an app like this can even work. Sometimes you have to take 2 steps back and try a completely different approach to move forward. Because the code stays a black box and you need to understand the bigger picture and develop a feel for how the AI could write it.
Autoconnection? Absolute pain. The text tool? Same story. Component tag grouping? No better.
But the worst part was the symbols. I wasted HOURS before I realized: Claude still can’t draw symbols properly. You get lost easily, thinking “the AI will handle everything”.
It won’t. Definitely not.
So in the end I built a complete symbol editor myself. Because I just needed it.
What now?
Honestly? That’s exactly what makes this exciting. This isn’t going to be an EPLAN clone or anything. This is going to be my own thing. Native macOS app, built with SwiftUI on Apple Silicon. Fast, clean, no bloat.
I’ll be posting here regularly from now on about what’s happening. What works, what doesn’t, and where I’ve hit another wall.
If anyone’s thinking about doing something similar: Claude Code was the best tool for me out of all of them. But you still need patience.
Martin