The way I've typically worked is static pages are allowed to be done in IB, but everything else is done in code. The reasoning is that doing things in code makes for much easier diffs and merges and also allows you to easily edit code in things outside of XCode (I personally prefer AppCode). Doing things in code makes thing a lot more explicit and can be setup so that the view code doesn't have to interfere and floor the view controller's code. The main problem is there are lots of things you can do in code that IB can't do, but not much (if anything) the other way around. You should always be able to write your views using pure code.