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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

#271

Post by spacedcowboy »

wobfan wrote: post #256
trymas wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bloody terminal. Like the most basic feature... Since when terminal is "the most basic feature"? Reading threads in HN and seeing mild "wars" how Kitty/Alacritty/Ghostty/iTerm/Konsole/you-name-it are worse/better than Kitty/Alacritty/Ghostty/iTerm/Konsole/you-name-it, because they are slower/faster, (in)compatible with some ancient niche protocols/standards, etc. Does not seem that basic to me? Also it's personal…

The fact that so many people are discussing their terminal just confirms the fact that a terminal is incredibly basic.

No. It. Doesn't.

The whole conversation came from someone claiming the most basic feature of an IDE is to include a terminal - that's why people are discussing terminals.

Don't get me wrong, I live in the terminal when using the computer, but I don't see a need for one when using Xcode.

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

#272

Post by spacedcowboy »

socalgal2 wrote: post #179
spacedcowboy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ? Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used…

I used to use terminal windows separate from my editor. Now I use VSCode, I have 6 different but related projects open. In VSCode this means 6 windows, each with multiple tabs etc. In each of those are 1 to 3 terminal editor windows. That means when I switch to that project, shells related to that project come with it. No having to hunt through 6 to 18 terminal windows to find the correct one(s) Turns out, for me, th…

I'm not commenting on other IDEs - I honestly wouldn't say I was really even familiar with VSCode, I've generally only used it from time to time when doing embedded stuff.

The original comment was aimed at Xcode though, and it's in that context that I'm (still) struggling to see why you need a terminal.

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

#273

Post by spacedcowboy »

laksjhdlka wrote: post #235
kalleboo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE I assumed it came from Windows users who have a habit of running everything in full-screen.

I'm sitting here wondering why you'd run anything not full-screened, save for some rare situation where you are comparing multiple windows line by line (and don't have a short term memory).

I don't often run things full-screen. I like windows, they give you virtual screen real-estate at the click of a mouse.

Example: Right now I have a project with a main application, a launch agent, and a framework. I can fit 3 columns of text with the font at a size I can easily read across one window in Xcode. I generally work for a period of time in one of the app/agent/framework areas, so I have 3 Xcode windows open on the same project, each having ~90% of the screen with a little overlap.

Sometimes I'll have another similar window, for out-of-context work. If I'm creating a class, and suddenly realise I want to re-factor some other class to make it work, I'll open another window (again with the 3 columns) for the re-factor work, leaving the state of where I was ready to come back to at the click of a mouse.

I personally find it easier to mouse-click to change context than any other way, so keeping the screen 'mostly' used works better for me.

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

#274

Post by k4rli »

billynomates wrote: post #266
mads_quist wrote: post #265

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though. Native app development is an evil necessity.

As someone who use Eclipse and transitioned to Android Studio over the course of my career, Android Studio is actually pretty great. These days I use Cursor almost exclusively for Flutter, but Android Studio is great for building native Android apps.

I would recommend trying out kilocode as a vscodium extension instead of Cursor. Better pricing and more model options. For me it completely replaced Cursor and couldn't be happier.

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

#276

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

aylmao wrote: post #262
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. All software of comparable size and complexity have shortcomings that everyone learns to work around. And a great many of those shortcomings are actually just highly subjective personal preferences. More than half of the complaints in this thread are, to me, a terrible idea.

> All software of comparable size and complexity have shortcomings that everyone learns to work around. This is part of the issue IMO. Is this size and complexity warranted? Rust for example; its a complex language, can target pretty much all platforms under the sun, and yet it's configured with just text files, builds with just terminal commands, and works great with any text editor. I've seen people in big tech wor…

Practical answer? I don’t know, man. I’m just building a todo list after all. Heck, I build more complex apps than that but front-end work is at such a high level of abstraction that, realistically, I just never bother. I don’t mind a smaller download size, but it’s just a nice-to-have.

The point about Xcode being complex, I disagree with. Honestly I could think of so many additional features to make my workflow easier.

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

#277

Post by mlajtos »

openclawai wrote: post #172
mlajtos wrote: post #48

Does it support API key access or only Claude.ai subscription?

Worth noting that "API key access" vs "subscription" has significant cost implications for heavy users. Claude.ai Pro is $20/month flat. But if you're doing serious agent-assisted coding (multi-file refactors, iterative debugging loops), you can blow through $50-100/day in API costs. The math changes depending on usage patterns. Subscription makes sense for interactive coding sessions. API keys make sense if you're b…

I am doing interactive coding sessions via API. I don't want to see a message that I am over limit to use the best model there is.

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

#278

Post by mindok »

Aloisius wrote: post #162
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?

While I don't quite have the same problems as others have, there are some pain points. Stepping through the debugger too fast will sometimes put the debugger in a weird state where step never breaks again and all other breakpoints stop working. Git pull through the UI with stash and merge can blow away your local changes if there is a conflict. The changes aren't stashed. They're just gone. Xcode likes to sometimes r…

I may be wrong, but the simulators seem to be Intel binaries which mess with audio since the last macOS update I did, so no zoom calls with XCode open for me.

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

#279

Post by pasc1878 »

neutronicus wrote: post #71
flohofwoe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Yes, I develop C++ on XCode and Visual Studio. I've recently started using XCode more because the performance on my Windows tower has become abominable in the past couple years and the M1 laptop is still snappy. XCode is just terrible compared to Visual Studio. As you said, there are weird beachballs all the time both while stepping and while waiting for the application to stop at a breakpoint (in cases where it happ…

Xcode is really only usable for Objective-C, C and Swift its support for C++ e.g. simple things like formatting and definitions and debugging for C++ are as you note are just poor

Visual Studio does treat C++ as a first class language (I suspect because that was the first non C language it supported and Windows apps used C++ in the 1990s)

I would try Clion for C++ if you can't use VS. Eclipse was reasonable 15 years ago when Apple used gcc.

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

#280

Post by isodev »

mads_quist wrote: post #265

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though. Native app development is an evil necessity.

From all the things to work on Xcode... fixing the ghost diagnostic errors, actual hot reload instead of the nightmare Previews are, tooling to help diagnose the now messy Swift 6 concurrency code, that thing where you can't open a project and one of it's dependent swift packages for editing simultaneously ...

The list of actually useful things that can be added/changed in Xcode has more tokens than Claude is allowed to read at one time before grepping.

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