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Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

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Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#51

Post by sunnybeetroot »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #39
flohofwoe wrote: post #13

Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/ Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix and optimization releases instead of hype-chasing.

A full rebuild might be throwing out the baby with the bath water. As someone who’s been using it since it was known as Project Builder, bugs seem mostly concentrated in the XIB/Storyboard editor (formerly known as a Interface Builder), SwiftUI live preview, and SwiftPM package resolve. In a project with code-only UIKit, only a smattering of SwiftUI for small components, and minimal dependencies, Xcode isn’t too bad…

Refactoring works half the time, Android Studio is much more stable for basic developer tooling.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#53

Post by hn-acct »

r2vcap wrote: post #44

Wait… https://xcodereleases.com hasn’t shown anything since last December, so I assumed Apple had taken a breather from Xcode development, but they released an RC build today? Anyway, the Swift version seems unchanged (6.2.3), so is this update mainly for the so-called “Coding Intelligence” features? In any case, Xcode isn’t my favorite IDE—it’s too slow and feels quite different from other major IDEs—so I probably w…

swift --version is showing 6.2.4 for me

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#54

Post by flohofwoe »

allthetime wrote: post #45
flohofwoe wrote: post #13

Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/ Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix and optimization releases instead of hype-chasing.

Honest question. I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch. Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day. What is so horrible about XCode?

My pain points are mostly in the CPU debugger (since I'm not using much of the actual "IDE features" of Xcode except the regular edit-compile-debug loop anyway.

Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI? This problem seems to go back to the ancient times, but it gets worse and worse the bloatier macOS UI processes become (e.g. the more system frameworks they load at start).

The debugger variable view panel is so bare bones that it looks like it's ripped out straight from an 80's home computer monitor program.

When debug-stepping, the debugger frontend is quite often stuck for 10s of seconds at completely unpredictable places waiting for the debugger to respond (it feels like a timeout).

Step-debugging in general feels sluggish even compared to VSCode with lldb.

For comparison, VS2026 isn't exactly a lightweight IDE either, but debugging sessions start instantly, debug-stepping is immediate, and the CPU debugger is much more feature rich than Xcode's. While in Xcode, everything feels like it's been added as a checklist item, but then never actually used by the Xcode team (I do wonder what they're using to develop Xcode, I doubt that they are dogfooding their own work).

The one good and useful thing about Xcode is the Metal debugger though.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#55

Post by ddalex »

flohofwoe wrote: post #13

Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/ Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix and optimization releases instead of hype-chasing.

> Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix

Claude code 8 hours later: It's done, mate!

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#56

Post by r2vcap »

thought_alarm wrote: post #34

Release notes: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note... Surprisingly, this version does not require MacOS 26 (Tahoe).

From my years of iOS development—and based on https://xcodereleases.com typically ships two major Xcode updates each year:

- X.0 (September): bumps Swift, SDK versions, etc. It also tends to have a noticeably longer beta cycle than other releases. - X.3 or X.4 (around March): bumps Swift again and raises the minimum required macOS version.

Other releases in between are usually smaller updates that add features or fix bugs, but they don’t involve major toolchain-level or fundamental changes.

Today’s release doesn’t bump the Swift version, which suggests the core toolchain is essentially the same as Xcode 26.2—so it makes sense that the minimum macOS version wasn’t raised either.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#57

Post by meisel »

My experience with AI with its predecessor, Xcode 26.2, was _really_ bad. One bug made it objectively unusable, and there were lots of fun issues/huge functionality gaps on top of that. Apple doesn't really seem to "get" agent-based coding, but I'm curious to see the results of other braver souls with 26.3.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#58

Post by r2vcap »

hn-acct wrote: post #53
r2vcap wrote: post #44

Wait… https://xcodereleases.com hasn’t shown anything since last December, so I assumed Apple had taken a breather from Xcode development, but they released an RC build today? Anyway, the Swift version seems unchanged (6.2.3), so is this update mainly for the so-called “Coding Intelligence” features? In any case, Xcode isn’t my favorite IDE—it’s too slow and feels quite different from other major IDEs—so I probably w…

swift --version is showing 6.2.4 for me

Thanks for clarifying. Since I don’t use the LLM features in Xcode, I’m leaning toward skipping this version.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#59

Post by HaloZero »

anupamchugh wrote: post #50

When do you actually need to open Xcode if you have XcodeBuildMCP [0]? I haven't opened Xcode in months. My terminal: Claude writes code. build_sim. launch_app_sim. screenshot describe_ui. What still requires Xcode: Instruments profiling, Signing/provisioning For UI iteration, describe_ui returning the accessibility tree might actually be more useful to an agent than a preview screenshot.

I still haven't found a useful way to replicate preview when iterating quickly on a view (though it's an edge case)

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#60

Post by embedding-shape »

emchammer wrote: post #25
flohofwoe wrote: post #13

Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/ Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix and optimization releases instead of hype-chasing.

A lot of macOS needs that. There are some terrific ideas under the hood, but it’s as if people left halfway through implementing them.

It's a damn shame, the hardware is pretty amazing and I wish they just had like one person who cared about Linux working at Apple and then make a small promise to not rugpull Linux users.
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