Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 348 posts

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

#151

Post by c-fe »

nerdsniper wrote: post #148
dylan604 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates? As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.

There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive. I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools. This has driven me to madness too.

select in finder the file that currently opens with XCode, then press Cmd+i. It opens the information panel. There in the Open with section, you can chose the app and then also Change all to not use XCode.

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

#152

Post by wlesieutre »

DonHopkins wrote: post #140
cyrusradfar wrote: post #130

OT: Rant Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic. Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind. Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch. I just want to look at a text f…

> sleep(rand()) You're being too kind. It feels like a 8 cores worth of parallel busy loops to me! I bet Alan Dye insisted they put it in there so users can pause their busy to gaze at and appreciate his artistically minimal unpainted Liquid Glass window frame.

I like to take a few minutes to admire the content underneath/behind my sidebars

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

#153

Post by jbm »

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 sometimes have to build code for the apple watch. Getting it to pair with XCode is incredibly frustrating and is the opposite of what you would expect.

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

#154

Post by etothet »

cap10morgan wrote: post #9

I am already using Claude in Xcode 26.2. What did they change / add specifically in 26.3? It's not super clear behind the marketing haze.

I came here to ask this question. I find the existing agentic coding integraton to be clunky and slow. I've had much better luck with my Xcode projects just using my agentic coding tool of choice in the CLI.

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

#156

Post by walthamstow »

cyrusradfar wrote: post #130

OT: Rant Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic. Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind. Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch. I just want to look at a text f…

The hijacking of file associations is one of the most awful and malicious things about macOS. You can set it to whatever you want, when Apple decide they want to, your CSVs will go to Numbers, JSONs go to Xcode.

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

#157

Post by cyrusradfar »

dylan604 wrote: post #144
cyrusradfar wrote: post #130

OT: Rant Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic. Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind. Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch. I just want to look at a text f…

I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates? As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.

You're right that you can fix it via Get Info → Change All.

I know the procedure.

The issue is that Xcode updates and macOS updates tend to reset those associations back. There's a long-running Apple Community thread titled literally "Stop hijacking file extensions with xcode" ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253702137?sortBy=rank ) and another I saw recently where a user documents their .md associations reverting after closing their laptop lid.

It's not universal, but it's not delusion either.

The deeper annoyance is extensionless files and edge cases -- log files, build artifacts, random output from scripts ... where there's no clean association to override.

Those fall through to whatever macOS thinks is clever, which is often Xcode.

As for "why should Apple provide it" -- because the company was founded by a guy named Steve who believed that details and care matter. Someone who said how the insides of a computer looks is as important as the outside and nagged his partner until the circuits looked right in their home-brew project.

Also yes, fair point, I should just fix it and stop complaining.

I failed at that today. Please forgive me.

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

#158

Post by scosman »

searls wrote: post #127
scosman wrote: post #106

All of this could be avoided if their CLIs worked reliably and well. Instead the randomly fail (you fix them by running the same task from Xcode), and output 5k lines of useless unstructured output (tools like xcbeautify try to help but it’s an uphill battle). I feel like Xcode knows how to work around xcodebuild’s shortcomings, and instead of fixing them they just wrapped Xcode in an MCP server. Better than nothing…

This is true of the CLIs that start with `xcode` but not of the CLIs that start with `swift`. As `swift-format` and `swift-test` have come into their own, they're just as reliable as any other language ecosystem. And the difference is indeed staggering. I wrote this guide last summer on extracting all your app's code into a (nonsensically necessary) Swift package dependency simply so you can test it with Swift Testin…

Yes! If you’re lucky enough to be writing a library you are in good shape. Swift did things right.

I have UI and UI tests and xcodebuild is my nemesis.

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

#159

Post by Ryder123 »

gwking wrote: post #38
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.

For the record, I started using Xcode before it was called that and people have said this almost every year since. As I recall there was a big hit to its quality when they converted it to obj-c’s short lived garbage collection, and it felt like it never got back to reliable after that.

Ahhh ProjectBuilder...

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

#160

Post by gloosx »

dylan604 wrote: post #144
cyrusradfar wrote: post #130

OT: Rant Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic. Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind. Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch. I just want to look at a text f…

I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates? As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.

>Not once has it ever changed on me.

I don't know how did you achieve it, but I was doing it countless times.

Open with -> other -> enable all applications -> always open with.

For a short while it works, but somehow, something always reverts it back to xcode. Maybe it is restart. Maybe it is little evil cron job discreetly changes it back to xcode, but I was never able to get rid of it. It is happening to me on many different machines since Sierra. One calm day I casually double-click an STL or JSON and it prompts me to install some xcode packages, and I get angry at the machine.

Post reply on HN