I used this last night to vibe-code a simple iOS game using the GPT-5 model. I found the developer experience to be quite awful and shockingly more regressive than a CLI (I.e. Cloud Code). Totally unbecoming of a company that claims to never be the first but do it always better than the rest.
This should have been a POC for a demo to the Xcode sponsor program. At best, this should have been part of the first beta — not beta 7….
First sin: someone decided to expose the chat window on the same side as the file explorer as an alternate tab. On an IDE where you can’t move things around freely like in VSCode, how one can make that design decision is beyond me.
Any developer trying to use this feature, regardless of the model picked, will have to constantly physically switch between the file explorer and the chat window (or conversation window). This feels like a silly thing to crib about but it starts becoming irritating for long coding sessions.
Then comes the baffling user experience where sometimes the question asked by the response from the LLM is randomly answered automatically by the IDE itself with a vague entry that says “Project context” with not much visibility into what the actual response was from the IDE. And then there are random times where the question is left unanswered and now I as a developer have to now decide how to answer the question. It almost feels to me like there is zero system prompt from Xcode itself. This will never ever compete with agentic coding tools.
Apple has a lot of incompetent PMs and EPMs but this is next level garbage. Zero thought has gone into how a developer today uses these “vibe-coding” tools in their workflows. It almost feels like this was shoved down the throat of the Xcode development team for whom orthodoxy was a higher priority.
Pardon my rage here because I have seen enough from inside to understand why Apple is behind in AI and it is frustrating as fuck.