Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

scottwillsey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 248 posts

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

#2

Post by Schiendelman »

I've been using essentially this process (with Claude Code) for about six months. There are a couple of places where I've opened xcode; mostly to update the simulators for new betas of xcode 27, and once to add a target for Apple Watch (and I think something for HealthKit).

Interestingly, since about Opus 4.6, Claude has been able to reason its way into this process on its own. It was clunky until 4.7, and in 4.8 it's managed to find its way around every reason I had to open xcode myself.

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

#3

Post by Tiberium »

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 your LLM" at almost every stage in the blog post:

> point Claude Code or your LLM coding tool of choice to this blog post, and let it figure it out

> When in doubt, ask your LLM of choice about them and have it help you get set up. It’s the one that’s going to be using Xcode for you anyway.

> The whole point of using the LLM in the first place is to avoid doing things manually that you don’t want to do.

> Again, if in doubt, ask Claude Code or your LLM of choice to create this for you.

> Again, this is why you talk to your LLM, tell it what you want, and have it help build your workflow.

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

#6

Post by mrbombastic »

This is cool but also makes me worried about the tendency with llms for all of us to make bespoke solutions rather than building a better community tool or extending an existing tool to solve the problem. fastlane exists to solve exactly this problem in the mobile space.

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

#8

Post by CharlesW »

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 non-Axiom skills/agents.

¹ Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ ² Axiom CLI tools: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/tools/

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

#9

Post by schainks »

I just set up my pipeline to do this exact thing for both the Apple and Android ecosystems, dispatching loads to my mac studio or Linux box accordingly. I moved the runners off GitHub because uptime for GitHub actions has been trash lately, and the Apple Silicon runners are pricey.

Claude was great at figuring out what was broken when and either fixing it, or clicking as far as it could until it needed me.

You could say I'm mostly just IRL hands for the AI now.

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

#10

Post by ryandrake »

mrbombastic wrote: post #6

This is cool but also makes me worried about the tendency with llms for all of us to make bespoke solutions rather than building a better community tool or extending an existing tool to solve the problem. fastlane exists to solve exactly this problem in the mobile space.

Also, shell scripts as part of a build are usually a little worrying. I'd at least want the build steps to be all integrated into my Makefile or CMakeLists.txt
Post reply on HN