Click or tap on the audio player below for an AI generated deep-dive into this post.
Apple’s WeatherKit framework, developed by Dark Sky, which Apple acquired in 2020, was revealed to the developer community at WWDC 2022 and released in the fall of 2022. As an Apple Developer Program member, you are allowed up to 500,000 free API calls per month.
It’s an incredibly verbose framework and provides highly detailed weather information and information on celestial events such as the sun and moon’s rise, set times, and lunar phases. As a weather and astronomy geek, discovering this framework was like being a kid in a candy store.
With a release date of Fall 2022, I expected that Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s large language model (LLM) would be fluent in both the API’s features and the intricacies of hooking my app into it. I was mostly correct, except regarding the API hookup steps. While Claude understood the basics at the time of its last training session, like all of us, keeping up with the tsunami of changes Apple makes to its developer tools can be a full-time job.
Connecting my first WeatherKit app to the framework itself was a struggle. While resolving the initial local configuration issues was quick (a few minutes), the more significant issue was getting access to the WeatherKit framework service. Apple is perpetually updating its services for developers, and, unbeknownst to Claude, enabling the WeatherKit framework for your app is a bit more complicated than what its most recent training data set is aware of.
Struggling to configure the Claude-generated introductory WeatherKit app to connect to Apple’s framework service reinforced one of AI’s general limitations. After an hour of investigation, I successfully connected to the service and learned what, as of December 2024, the steps required to wire things together were. Now, I wanted to teach Claude what I’d learned. But I couldn’t. I wanted to ‘give back’ to the AI and educate it on the latest details of connecting to the framework service it was unaware of. But currently, since the flow of knowledge is in just one direction – the AI to us humans – giving back is impossible.
Does this limit AI’s ability to act as teachers? Not really. Over the past year, the significant AIs have been able to reach out beyond their last training session and find more current information. I expect this to improve even more with the subsequent major AI updates.
Next up – the fun stuff. Getting the current temperature at my location via the WeatherKit framework.
Forefront Systems 