During a seven-hour train ride in late December, my 10-year-old discovered Conway’s Game of Life, and we spent the whole ride building a simple Game of Life app using Swift Playground on the iPad - some hand written, some with the help of an LLM. Over the evenings and weekends since then we’ve been iterating on it and a couple of days ago we decided to send it off to App Store. Now it’s finally approved and you can get Stone of Life for yourself!

We’ve had so much fun making it and exploring Game of Life together. During the whole time we decided to keep it a Swift Playground project so that we can always just pick up an iPad and improve it when we’re not at home - even though we’ve been using Xcode on a Mac most of the time. This has limited what we can do but for this little project it’s worth it to just be able to make small tweaks on the go.

It is very much the product of me, my 10-year-old, and an LLM agent. There’s much more to say about it, but for now we’re just excited to have it out there. Version 1.1 is already in the works, with lots of small fixes and improvements!