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Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

scottwillsey.com

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Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#81

Post by pianopatrick »

codazoda wrote: post #78

One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that. The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my ch…

You could move your SSH keys onto a password encrypted usb drive that you physically remove from the computer.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#82

Post by lossyalgo »

natpalmer1776 wrote: post #39
ericol wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yo dawg

I heard you liked Claude, so I put extra Claude in your Claude so you can do more Claude.

I suppose it's easier to turn everyone into unwitting tokenmaxxers than it is to raise prices again.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#83

Post by fragmede »

codazoda wrote: post #78

One down-side to this is that it does require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox. I do this too and there are lots of problems I can't solve in a sandbox. I know a lot of you are throwing your hands up at the years of security practices we're throwing out the window when we do that. The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my ch…

On a Mac. Just get a Mac mini. It doesn't have to be a crazy big beefy one, and if you're selling apps, it's a justifiable business expense.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#84

Post by pclowes »

overgard wrote: post #30

Oh god, the app store does not need more slop. If you can't be bothered to open XCode (which I agree is a dumpster fire, but), you shouldn't be bothered to submit an app that a person has to review and another person has to filter out of their search results.

Counterpoint: XCode is such slop that an app made by a developer with the taste to avoid it has a higher probability of being less "sloppy" than average.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#85

Post by CharlesW »

semiquaver wrote: post #15
CharlesW wrote: post #8

If it's okay to mention my own complementary open source project, Axiom¹ does a good job of helping coding harnesses know how to do this effectively for Apple OS development. In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog , xcprof , xcsym , and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for n…

Axiom is excellent, thanks for making it!

I'm glad that it's been valuable for you!

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#86

Post by fragmede »

hetspookjee wrote: post #63
mvkel wrote: post #60

In my experience, the better long-term choice if you're going to vibe code an app is to use Expo. Its basis is React, so the code output quality is much higher than Swift because there is much more React code in LLM training data. Everything is in the command line, and debugging is a breeze because it's a web view. But once it's compiled to native iOS, it feels like any other native app. Expo + Fastlane = fully autom…

Some parts when creating a new app cannot be automated right? Eg registering the app itself for example.

You can have your AI agent use computer-use to click around on in a browser open on developer.apple.com if that's counts as automated to you.

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#87

Post by smashah »

CharlesW wrote: post #8

If it's okay to mention my own complementary open source project, Axiom¹ does a good job of helping coding harnesses know how to do this effectively for Apple OS development. In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog , xcprof , xcsym , and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for n…

Use axiom all the time thanks for your work. The next frontier in iOS app tooling is self-hostable Linux based build server. Thoughts?

Re: Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

#90

Post by quasarj »

Tiberium wrote: post #3

It's kind of funny to be reading this: > I had Claude Code create mine: I told Claude, more or less: I want to archive, Developer ID-sign, notarize, staple, and install this app to /Applications without ever opening Xcode. Write me a script that does the whole chain and fails loudly if any step breaks. Even though the text we're reading is Claude talking to us as well :) Also it was weird to see the mention of "ask y…

The mistakes in the text made me doubt it was AI, but who knows, maybe it's doing that on purpose now
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