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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

#91

Post by bromuro »

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?

I also enjoy working with XCode. It has glitches and it is a bit slow, but I love the look and feel and it I am positively inspired working with it.

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

markbao wrote: post #87
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.

This is not hype-chasing. AI is a key part of software engineering now. For this to be absent from Xcode would be an existential risk for the future of the product.

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by gbriel »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #36
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #10

I wonder how much of the recent Apple OS releases were done with "agentic coding".

According to Mark Gurman (Bloomberg Apple beat reporter), Apple “runs on Claude.” https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199?s=61

"custom versions of Claude"

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

#94

Post by f0rmatfunction »

w10-1 wrote: post #63
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.

Agreed - I tried installing Xcode26.3 on my mac running Sequoia and there's no "intelligence" pane in Xcode settings to connect Claude like there is in the docs.

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

#95

Post by indycliff »

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?

There is barely anything wrong with Xcode. I'd rather it than the bloat that is Android Studio or Visual Code. Haters gonna hate. I also write apps for every Apple platform and really no complaints except I wouldn't mind a better Vim mode (it does however suffice!)

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

#96

Post by briandw »

embedding-shape wrote: post #65
briandw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are of course correct. It's not likely to succeed. "Could work" doesn't mean high chance of success. I was trying to imply the opposite. It's just that Xcode has so much baggage that the previous attempts have been very compromised.

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

#97

Post by neutronicus »

eptcyka wrote: post #88
markbao wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not hype-chasing. AI is a key part of software engineering now. For this to be absent from Xcode would be an existential risk for the future of the product.

Claude Code from the terminal is servicable enough. Yet I cannot open the same project from different versions of Xcode without some manual finnagling. Xcode is at no existential risk for it is the only tool you are allowed to use to reach your audience on the app store. Don’t be ridiculous. The reason Xcode is as broken as it is today is because of the same exact reason. The developer experience need not be great, a…

For a certain-size project it really is not.

Single files in our codebase already blow the Copilot query token limit.

Great, Anthropic taught Claude to grep. On our project, it's still useless because it can't use the semantic search in the IDE.

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

#98

Post by neutronicus »

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.

Can XcodeBuildMCP spit out definitions of C++ symbols? Did Apple just accidentally release a LSP server for Xcode projects? That would be sick.

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

#99

Post by spacedcowboy »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #76
allthetime wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. A decade ago I used to develop in PyCharm for websites, and Visual Studio .Net for desktop apps. Then I had to learn XCode for a mobile app. It was a surreal experience, like going back ten years in UX, while at the same time dealing with a myriad of modern…

Honestly, that just sounds like it does things in an unfamiliar (to you) way. That's the flip side of the coin "This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings".

There is no perfect IDE. They all have problems / are inadequate / get in the way. I absolutely loathe IntelliJ IDEA for example, and think Eclipse is needlessly complex (though I'd like their code-indentation/formatting UI to replace the one in Xcode).

Honestly, Xcode gets a lot of bad comments, but it works pretty well for me and the debugging tools are pretty much top-notch if you take the time to learn them.

I started a project on January 5th. Running sloc right now I see:

---------- Result ------------

            Physical :  44454
              Source :  31019
             Comment :  7284
 Single-line comment :  2622
       Block comment :  4662
               Mixed :  210
 Empty block comment :  2
               Empty :  6363
               To Do :  0
Number of files read : 195

----------------------------

That's a lot of code in just under a month (and none of it from AI tools), I don't think the IDE is getting in my way.

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

#100

Post by stalfosknight »

doug_durham wrote: post #82
egorfine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In what way is "AI being shoved down you throat"? Did you think that SwiftUI was shoved down your throat? Did you think that CoreData was shoved down your throat. Perhaps develop a more nuanced critique.

Copilot being added to the Xbox app on iOS is the latest ridiculous example I've seen of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.
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