Today I thought I hit a bug.
The app was built. Signed. The logs looked clean. And then it just sat there. Ten minutes. Twenty. Half an hour. Nothing moved.
My first thought, of course: I broke something. Wrong certificate? Wrong Apple ID password? Did some tool in my build quietly break again? When anything freezes, a programmer's first instinct is always "what did I do wrong."
So I checked everything. And it wasn't me. It was Apple.
More exactly: notarization was stuck on "In Progress." It is supposed to take a few minutes. I searched, and I wasn't the only one waiting (the forums were full of it).
There's a quiet joke in here about the AI era.
It used to be: developers write slowly, Apple reviews slowly. Everyone is slow together.
Now it's: AI builds you an app in one afternoon, and Apple says — hold on, I haven't hired enough people yet.
I used to worry the code wouldn't get finished. Now I worry the code is finished and Apple hasn't caught up.
The funniest part is the status page. My four builds were all stuck, the history a long column of "In Progress" — like an airport board where every flight says Boarding but no plane has arrived. And the official status page sat there, calm. No incidents. All services normal. Normal. Very normal. So normal it was like nothing was happening at all.
Maybe this is one of the side effects of building with AI. Your own speed jumps, but nothing else in the chain speeds up with you.
You can have AI write the login screen, the database, the UI, the build script — even a very confident release note. But at the end you still hand the app to Apple. And Apple does not work overtime just because you used AI. It quietly takes your package and puts it in a line with no end in sight.
So the whole thing turns into:
AI: done.
Me: that fast?
Apple: not so fast.
It's not a disaster. You just wait. What actually made me laugh is that I spent half a day doubting my own setup, and the problem was never on my side. I had underestimated the basic gap in this new era:
The code is on a bullet train. The review is still one person at a counter.
Software used to be like laying bricks, one on top of the next. Now AI backs up a truck and drops every brick at your door at once. And then you notice the guard at the gate is still writing the visitor log by hand.
So today's conclusion is simple. It wasn't a bug. It wasn't the certificate. It wasn't the config, and it wasn't bad luck.
Apple just got hit by vibe coding too.