There are ghosts in Koder

The Haunted Coding App: My Story with KODER

1. A Sudden Game Development Challenge

In May 2025, I suddenly decided to make a game. I shared my game idea with ChatGPT and received code.
Looking back now, it’s quite absurd, but I wondered where to put that code. I tried uploading it to a private Naver Cafe that I was using alone, but the game didn’t work. I tried uploading other things just in case, but they wouldn’t upload because they were too long.
So I asked my 1 to download a coding program for me.
Since I only had an iPad, she found a free iPad coding app and installed it—that was KODER.

2. A ghost appeared in KODER

When I pasted the code into KODER, the game appeared and I could edit it. It worked well.
Three months later, I discovered that files I had deleted in KODER weren’t disappearing—they kept appearing like ghosts. Rebooting or turning it off and on didn’t help. Moreover, it frequently crashed, so I had to restart it often.
The Worpuzz index file had already been deleted… but it was duplicated so many times and appeared attached to the file I was currently working on.



[Photo: Duplicated files]

3. Discovering Tab Hell

KODER shows open files at the top like that, but I had never closed them. KODER failed at tab management and automatically loaded files like a bug.
So I started removing them one by one by clicking the x on each tab, but they wouldn’t delete—they kept reappearing. Deleted files kept showing up and were even attached to other files.
Files that didn’t even exist in the KODER folder were present in the tabs.

[Photo: Non-existent files]

So I copied only what was in the local KODER folder to iCloud Drive and deleted the KODER app.

4.The reason a ghost appeared in Koder was because I didn't close the tabs.

Later, I figured out why.
I create file #1.
I create file #2.
I edit file #1.
I delete file #1 from the file list on the left.
What happens is: there are already 2 tabs open for file #1, and I only delete one of them.
Since I never closed tabs, there were roughly a thousand tabs open. The tabs at the top were barely visible, and I hadn’t paid attention to them.
So I thought the file was gone because I deleted it from the file list on the left, but since the tabs were still open at the top, it wouldn’t actually disappear.

5. Attempted Escape to Mac

When I told my daughter, she said, “Nobody codes on iPad these days,” and told me to use her Mac when she goes to work.
My daughter’s Mac already had a coding program installed—Visual Studio.
After using simple KODER, Visual Studio looked dazzling and I had no idea what to do. What were those lines? There were too many menus, and it made me dizzy.

6. Back to KODER After All

I gave up on coding with Visual Studio on Mac and reinstalled KODER on my iPad…
There’s a reason it’s free.
I can’t save anything because files might disappear at any moment. Even though I carefully close tabs after using them to avoid past mistakes, when I save something large, it automatically copies and pastes to other files and gradually multiplies.
Still, I’ve gotten used to KODER, so I keep using it. I save to Notes or GitHub, use KODER only for working, and keep only one tab open at a time.

🪄 Dev log originally written in Korean | Translated with Claude

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