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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

#61

Post by cosmic_cheese »

sunnybeetroot wrote: post #51
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've not found Android Studio to be particularly amazing for those kinds of features either. Sometimes they work, sometimes they half-work, and on occasion I've had them do the wrong thing entirely.

A lot of refactoring work across both platforms ends up being manual one way or another.

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

#62

Post by walt_grata »

ddalex wrote: post #55
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!

Come on Claude, making it not start isn't the same as fixing the bugs

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

#63

Post by w10-1 »

thought_alarm wrote: post #34

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

> this version does not require MacOS 26

I think it is required for any AI support. Xcode will run with limited features on earlier OS's.

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

#64

Post by XenophileJKO »

egorfine wrote: post #35
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.

Bugfixes won't make shareholders happy while shoving AI down our throats will.

So you're still in the anger phase?

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

#65

Post by embedding-shape »

briandw wrote: post #26
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.

True that Xcode needs yet another rebuild from scratch. If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work. However adding support for Claude is still a huge win. Could lead the way to making the transition to a sane IDE possible / reasonable. This would require leadership that’s completely absent at the company.

> If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work.

Ever attempted this before at a large company and had success with it? I think I can count four times so far in ~15 years where people attempted to rewrite something medium/large-scale from scratch around me, was a success once, although scope was drastically cut at the end so almost a stretch to call it a success.

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

#67

Post by WillAdams »

brokencode wrote: post #28
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.

Idk, I feel like these coding assistant features aren’t that hard to add, but can provide a lot of value to developers. Most or all popular IDEs now support similar features. I don’t disagree that Apple could use a major focus on bug fixing across their platforms right now though.

Yeah, I'd like to see another OS release like to Snow Leopard (10.6.x) which had as a prime focus simplification and so forth w/o adding many (any?) features.

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

#68

Post by arjie »

Okay, this is going to help somewhat. But what I wish I had was command-line access to everything in a reliable way. Developing for iOS I frequently end up with imperfect debugging information exposed to a Claude Code etc. agent. I'll try to get this today and see.

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

#69

Post by Eric_WVGG »

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?

Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating.

First, the performance is just bad. The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day.

The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me run weird functions and interact with stuff" UIs like terminal, debug and logs are in the bottom panel. Or maybe a new tab in the main workspace area?

The SwiftUI preview canvas can't be floated as a separate window, making it all but useless on anything smaller than a 16" MBP (and only barely usable there). In fact, I think it might be impossible to use Xcode in multiple screens altogether…?

Old simulator versions and cache files hang around forever, you need a third-party app like DevCleaner just to keep your storage from filling with nonsense. Cryptic messages like "copying symbols to device"… clear-cache that doesn't seem to clear-cache, that stupid list UI for info.plist…

I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about PNPM package management, but you can always just delete `node_modules` and reinstall and count on things working. Swift package management is a cryptic mess, and their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it. Like the info.plist thing, a lot of Xcode is based on a developer UI philosophy from the Mac Classic days that has mostly been abandoned by the rest of the world.

Mostly, I think the vitriol surrounding Xcode is that Apple seems to think they're doing a good job; meanwhile their most ardent and adept users are insisting that they are not. Same boat as MacOS, really.

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

#70

Post by trinix912 »

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?

Mostly the fact that for the past 10 years they've been adding new features but never finished them and taken the time to properly bugfix them along the way. Just a few I ran into recently:

- Interface Builder is stuck in early 2010s. Not only is the property panel missing half of options we now take for granted everywhere else (like corner radius), it also randomly won't read fonts in the current project, will crash the entire IDE if you Cmd-Z a big change (things like unembedding a view) and half the UI is still not rendered the way it will be on the phone. Yes, Swift UI exists, but most bigger apps are still XIBs and Storyboards and it's going to remain that way for quite some time.

- Autocomplete is a hit or miss. Very much like the mid-90s Microsoft IDEs where you'd get totally useless results until you've typed the whole line out already. It can be done well, look at AppCode.

- Syntax highlighting feels pretty much the same. Randomly flashes on and off, often doesn't highlight until return is pressed, takes a long time to load on large files etc.

- Git integration is by far the worst I've seen out of any IDE and I've seen many. I'd go as far as to say that SourceSafe integration in VB6 was done better. Just the whole layout, modal-on-modal returning to the first modal on an error in the second and so on. It's crashed when rebasing a few times too, I don't trust it with larger operations since.

- Documentation browser is this annoying little window with semi-useful search. But don't worry, the docs in there are useless anyways. I could go on and on about their approach to docs but maybe next time.

Don't even get me started on performance. Things like switching file tabs should be instant by now but there are still noticeable delays for larger files and IB screens. Plus there's now two kinds of tabs (app-level and file-level) to add to the mess.

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