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…
Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
311–320 of 348 posts
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#312MCP support is the real story here Means you're not locked into Claude or Codex Can plug in whatever agent you want
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#313(Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode). I recently started working for a startup, and they wanted an app. What I shipped was a react native app (so I don't need to go in to Xcode to build), that renders a full screen web browser that points to our website. I've sprinkled in bits of injected JS to capture our cookies and local/session storage -…
* This is coming from someone doing iOS since the store opened in 2008. I've pretty much seen ALL the bad decisions at some point. There are projects I will not take no matter what the pay is.
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#314(Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode). I recently started working for a startup, and they wanted an app. What I shipped was a react native app (so I don't need to go in to Xcode to build), that renders a full screen web browser that points to our website. I've sprinkled in bits of injected JS to capture our cookies and local/session storage -…
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Native app development is an evil necessity. I wish people did more native app development.
Same, I did try to sell native app development to my current project, but some higher up had already decided on React Native at the time. And I get it, it feels like native app development is a more expensive specialism, and this particular use case is mostly the customer portal but in an app. But I retain the strong opinion that if you as a company are serious about app development, if you want a good app, you need…
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#316Building 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?
Most of the problems I encounter now resulted from the fiasco that is SwiftUI. I used to really enjoy development, and built a few mobile apps singlehandedly... even at a well-known company or two. But now I'm struggling to get one chunk of functionality at a time done on a from-scratch app, because SwiftUI and the underlying "reactive" paradigm were so poorly conceived and defectively implemented. Development is now miserable drudgery, and I never feel confident about the result. The absurd gymnastics to trick the UI into doing what you want; and the hypocritical, conflicting edicts for Swift and SwiftUI... it all barely hangs together.
The fact that Apple rolled out a new UI toolkit that didn't support the most fundamental paradigm in mobile applications, a stack of progressive views for the user to proceed through, tells you how far off the rails they went since introducing the original and solid SDK.
And testing is going to be a nightmare... or simply futile.
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#317MCP support is the real story here Means you're not locked into Claude or Codex Can plug in whatever agent you want
Unfortunately the MCP for external agent tools is flawed at the moment, it returns a format differing from its stated schema. So it doesn't work with OpenCode.
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#318MCP support is the real story here Means you're not locked into Claude or Codex Can plug in whatever agent you want
> plug in whatever agent you want Noob question: Does that include local models?
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#319I recently have pivoted to mainly working in either Claude of Codex on the command line, because their ability to run autonomously for long, extended periods wasn't possible in the turn-based Xcode intelligence features.
That, plus the fact that the agents could run command-line utilities and just generally be more "agent-y".
My way of working has really shifted this year. I've been experimenting with LLMs for coding for years now, but the models released in the past year really feel like they've hit a point where they write code much closer (sometimes indistinguishable) from how I would write it.
Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
#320(Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode). I recently started working for a startup, and they wanted an app. What I shipped was a react native app (so I don't need to go in to Xcode to build), that renders a full screen web browser that points to our website. I've sprinkled in bits of injected JS to capture our cookies and local/session storage -…
Whatever "SDUX" is...
every client ends up writing a parser, and then teams fight over who is responsible for doing work.
how good does that sound!