About the author
I’m Bruce Li, the founder of PicWay. I’m a heavy iPhone user with more than 100,000 photos. I’ve been using ChatGPT since 2022, and I’ve been programming and building my own tools the whole time, mostly for my own use.
Living with a library that size, I ran into the same problems again and again: memories I couldn’t find, a camera roll that never felt tidy, storage that kept filling up. Most photo apps I tried fix one of these. Few are built to feel like the iPhone Photos app itself while also solving the problems people actually have. So I started building PicWay.
The goal is simple: help people find their memories again, keep their library tidy, and save space when storage runs out.
Privacy matters to everyone, so I studied the private-vault apps on the market and built the vault I thought should exist. PicWay has no server that receives your photos; the private vault is encrypted and stored in your own iCloud.
Before launch I tried dozens of competing apps and read their reviews, and I test every feature on a real iPhone. PicWay is built with the help of several AI models, and every change is checked on a device before it ships.
How PicWay is built
PicWay is built by me working with a team of AI agents. At busy times dozens of them work in parallel, coordinated from a command center I built. The command center hands each agent a written brief with my exact words, tracks every change and who made it, logs every decision with its reason, and passes unfinished work to a fresh agent when one runs out of context, so nothing is lost. I decide what the product should do; the agents write the code, and every change goes through the same checks before it reaches anyone:
- One piece, one owner. Each agent works on one part of the app in its own copy, starting from the latest version, so two agents are kept from editing the same code at once.
- Independent review. Every change is read by a separate AI reviewer that starts with no context and no knowledge of the author’s reasoning. Reviewers only point out problems; the author fixes them and the change is reviewed again, for up to five rounds.
- Stricter review for the private vault. Code that touches the vault, deleting originals or writing to your photo library gets a second review by a stronger model, also in a clean session.
- Tests that must fail first. Key changes to the private vault and changes that touch your data must pass targeted tests before they join the main version, and we undo the fix once to prove the test really catches the problem.
- Real iPhone before release. Every build is installed on my own iPhone, and I check it by hand. Nothing becomes part of the main version until I have confirmed it on a device.
- Facts on this site are checked too. Every feature described on picway.app is tied to the code that implements it, and each page is reviewed for accuracy before it goes live.
Some people may assume PicWay is just another vibe-coded app. Try it, and you may notice how it differs from the other photo apps out there.