I make iOS apps, been doing it for about five years now. Apple Search Ads ended up being my main paid channel - no creatives needed, just keywords and bids, feels closer to engineering than marketing. Also the only channel left where you get actual deterministic attribution, everything else is probabilistic mess. Anyway the work itself is mind-numbing. Bid adjustments, keyword mining, cross-negatives, checking what actually converts vs what just burns budget. You know the type of work where you're doing it and wondering what you're doing with your life.

At some point the idea to automate it felt pretty obvious. I wanted Claude Opus specifically because quality matters here - these are real money decisions. But running it twice a day at 50-80 tool calls per session, API bill would be brutal. Using Claude Code sub through OAuth turned out to be a great hack for this. Honestly cool that Anthropic lets you use it this way.

Agent pulls data from three places: Apple Search Ads API, App Store Connect, and a lightweight SDK installed in the apps. Strategy side I took an open source ASA playbook, split it into phases, and mixed in what I learned from my own campaigns. Agent picks the right playbook depending on where app is at and keeps memory between runs.

Apple's APIs are a pain to work with and this is where vibe coding really bites you. Agent sort of figures them out but not fully - gets 90% right so you trust it. Then some edge case hits, like the reporting endpoint that puts your only report slot on a 31 day cooldown if you request it wrong, and now you're both fumbling. Either you spend a bunch of sessions on trial and error together or you go into the trenches and read the docs & code yourself. Which, let's be honest, those muscles have atrophied a bit at this point.

Still - genuinely great time to be building stuff solo. All this business grind that used to feel like a completely different job is just becoming engineering problems. Write a spec, let agent handle it, enjoy the building part. That's the dream honestly.