In the past, developers would have resorted to starting with interface builder to do their designs. As they continued the development process, theyd notice that more and more of their views had to be done in code because Interface Builder wasn't powerful enough to do what they wanted. It could then be understandable why for newer projects, someone would skip Interface Builder altogether and go for code-only from the start.
Things have changed now though. Auto-Layout is extremely powerful in both Interface Builder and through code. Out of the box your visually designed interfaces now support powerful alignment and resizing irregardless of screen size. This is a big deal because there are a lot of screen sizes in iOS these days (iphone4, iphone5, ipad, all of these in landscape and portrait and yet again all these permutations with and without the keyboard open). auto-layout makes internationalization super easy too as all objects on your interface are designed to get bigger as words get longer (such as in German), yet have all associated objects around them still be perfectly aligned. Even right-to-left languages (and interface re-ordering) is supported without any additional code.
Looking at the code in the article, none of these are supported. If you even turn your iphone landscape the ui will be cut off. Let alone supporting ipad, keyboard open, longer words in the buttons/labels, etc.
I highly recommend new iOS developers to start with Auto-Layout from the getgo: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserE...
It's like tables vs css. Use CSS, it's much more portable.