111–120 of 248 posts
I've built a few small MacOS dock widgets now by just telling Claude/OpenCode to build them. Works well enough if you're very explicit. The most useful one is a little weather sparkline to show local temperature forecasts. Useful every day.
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
If I had to guess, I would say this is the human summarised conversation(s) with a bot.
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…
I've been running my agents in a docker sandbox that automatically mounts the current directory. It's been a bit of a pain to figure out and maintain the set of tools I provision into the sandbox- but it's fun to watch codex go to the ends of the earth trying to figure out solutions using nodejs (the only runtime).
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…
I've been building and testing my iOS app just for fun via Linux only. Surprisingly, it's very easy. This works like a charm: https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool You do not need to upload to TestFlight or the App Store; you can just install the app locally to your iPhone via usb -- even from Linux! When in doubt, just ask your coding agent of choice to help you create and upload a Hello World iOS app. It's really easy…
Do the coding agents know about this tool?
As for the builds, your agent probably already knows how to do a lot of this from the command line, although explicit suggestions can help it build faster for different situations.
As for XcodeGen, you may find it unnecessary overhead if you're already using Xcode file system synced groups.
For iOS my biggest suggestion would be to enable App Store Connect skills for your agent (https://github.com/rorkai/App-Store-Connect-CLI).
With this not only do you not need Xcode all the time, you also don't even need to be near a MacBook.
Just make changes via Codex on your iPhone, the tell asc to build and upload to TestFlight, download and run the new version, iterate.
I should blog about more this, but I also went to some effort to add support free iOS provisioning with just an Apple ID (using internal APIs); and creating a nice DMGs for macOS app distribution (reverse engineered .DS_store files for this). And there's also a built-in command to install skills for coding agents, which was fun.
This [1] is an example app I built with it, a simple utility to manage macOS file extension handling.