Building a React Native app with Claude Code
Agents are genuinely good at React Native now. They write screens, wire navigation, and refactor components faster than you can. They are also consistently wrong about the same handful of things, and those things are the ones that get your app rejected.
What they do well
UI work, component composition, styling, form handling, list rendering, refactors across many files, and writing tests. If the task is expressible in TypeScript and React, an agent will usually do it correctly and quickly.
Where they fail, every time
Platform boundaries. An agent will happily write an entitlement check that only runs on the device, because from inside the JavaScript it looks complete. The server-side half is invisible to it unless your repo makes it obvious.
Store compliance. It does not know that a paywall without Restore Purchases gets rejected, that Sign in with Apple is mandatory alongside Google, or that a vague permission string fails review.
Native configuration. It will edit ios/ directly — which prebuild then erases — rather than reaching for a config plugin.
Architecture drift. Given the same task twice it will invent two different patterns, because nothing in the repo told it which one it already had.
How to fix it structurally
Write an AGENTS.md that states the conventions and, more importantly, the prohibitions — no second HTTP client, no raw SQL, never edit ios/ directly. Prohibitions constrain behaviour far more reliably than descriptions.
Use Agent Skills for repeated workflows. A skill is an invokable procedure; a rules file is ambient context the model may or may not weight. 'Add a screen' should be a skill that names the route group, the data pattern and the required states.
Make the repo runnable with no credentials. An agent that has to stop and ask for a Supabase key cannot work for more than a few minutes unattended.
Put the compliance knowledge in the repo, not in your head. If the paywall component already contains Restore Purchases, the agent cannot omit it.
skills/
add-screen/ Route groups, layout inheritance, required states
add-api-endpoint/ Contract, procedure level, tenant scoping
add-paywall/ Entitlements, server enforcement, review rules
add-native-module/ Config plugins, never edit ios/
ship-release/ OTA vs build, submission gate
debug-build-failure/ Five-layer narrowing procedure