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Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

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(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 - which then gets saved to device storage and reinjected on app startup.

There are a few native-ish bits sprinkled in - onboarding, notifications, error screens, loading indicators, etc - but for the most part we don't need to worry about our API borking old versions (which is moving extraordinarily fast).

The only semi tricky bit was native auth integration - that needs treated with a bit more care, and stored securely, but it took a few days.

I ship the app to TestFlight and the AppStore using Fastlane from the command line, match handles the certs, and I never have to open Xcode.

It is honestly bliss, and i've heard a lot of app developers moving to this model (interestingly it normally follows a failed SDUX implementation)

2 days agoby AJRF

MCP support is the real story here Means you're not locked into Claude or Codex Can plug in whatever agent you want

3 days agoby OsamaJaber

Release notes: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note...

Surprisingly, this version does not require MacOS 26 (Tahoe).

3 days agoby thought_alarm

Building 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.

3 days agoby flohofwoe

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 file with pretty print.

I do not need a 12GB IDE to render curly braces. cat has been doing this since 1971. Dennis Ritchie solved this.

Why, Apple, in 40 years, could you not ship a lightweight dev-oriented text viewer? You had NeXTSTEP. You had the DNA of the most elegant Unix workstation ever built.

And you gave us... this behemoth? An app whose launch time rivals a full Gentoo stage 1 install ( see: https://niden.net/post/gentoo-stage-1-installation )

TextEdit is not the answer.

I've used Xcode for native iOS development and honestly, once you get past the Stockholm Syndrome phase, it's just fine.

- The interface is learnable.

- The debugger mostly works.

But the load times -- on every high-end MBP I've ever owned -- suggest that somewhere deep in the Xcode binary, there's a sleep(rand()) that someone committed in 2006 and no one has had the courage to git blame.

FWIW, I fear someone here tells me I've been missing a launch flag. Alas, it's my truth and I can't hold it in anymore.

3 days agoby cyrusradfar

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though.

Native app development is an evil necessity.

2 days agoby mads_quist

I wonder how much of the recent Apple OS releases were done with "agentic coding".

3 days agoby OGEnthusiast

Anthropic's blog:

> Apple’s Xcode now supports the Claude Agent SDK

https://www.anthropic.com/news/apple-xcode-claude-agent-sdk

3 days agoby meetpateltech

All of this could be avoided if their CLIs worked reliably and well. Instead the randomly fail (you fix them by running the same task from Xcode), and output 5k lines of useless unstructured output (tools like xcbeautify try to help but it’s an uphill battle).

I feel like Xcode knows how to work around xcodebuild’s shortcomings, and instead of fixing them they just wrapped Xcode in an MCP server.

Better than nothing I guess, but reliable CLIs would allow a whole ecosystem of tools.

3 days agoby scosman

When do you actually need to open Xcode if you have XcodeBuildMCP [0]?

I haven't opened Xcode in months. My terminal: Claude writes code. build_sim. launch_app_sim. screenshot describe_ui.

What still requires Xcode: Instruments profiling, Signing/provisioning

For UI iteration, describe_ui returning the accessibility tree might actually be more useful to an agent than a preview screenshot.

3 days agoby anupamchugh

Who cares about AI’s embedded in IDEs? Here’s the tooling I need

* text editor with intellisense * build system * visual debugger * CLI coding agent

It’s totally fine if those four things are different. In fact I actually probably prefer them to be different. Having an all-in-one IDE is a complete and total non-goal.

People have historically confused the first three as needing to be a single IDE. This has always been wrong. The number of people who think you can’t debug with Visual Studio if the exe wasn’t built from a .sln is shocking. They’re all independent!

3 days agoby forrestthewoods

More than writing code the IDE itself makes me anxious. Especially Xcode. Wish they make the IDE interface somewhat simpler by leveraging AI.

3 days agoby robofanatic

"visually by capturing Xcode Previews" is probably the thing that will make this worthwhile, also if it's able to interact with the simulator that would be killer.

Beyond that, I'd just keep using Claude Code in the terminal.

3 days agoby mikeocool

I am already using Claude in Xcode 26.2. What did they change / add specifically in 26.3? It's not super clear behind the marketing haze.

3 days agoby cap10morgan

I don't think I'm ready for my phone apps to get even more sloppy...

I wonder if they used this internally to write iOS 26? Would explain some things...

3 days agoby SirMaster

It keeps asking if I want to run the app after building it. I reply yes, and then it says it can't do that, tries to build again by command line and gets stuck... (even with approving the command)

3 days agoby jon889

As a heavy Xcode user and native app developer: pretty excited to dig into this.

I 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.

2 days agoby gdubs

John Giannandrea leaves and things start to work well in the Apple AI department. Maybe just a coincidence :)

3 days agoby bytesandbits

Okay, this is going to help somewhat. But what I wish I had was command-line access to everything in a reliable way. Developing for iOS I frequently end up with imperfect debugging information exposed to a Claude Code etc. agent. I'll try to get this today and see.

3 days agoby arjie

Wait…

https://xcodereleases.com hasn’t shown anything since last December, so I assumed Apple had taken a breather from Xcode development, but they released an RC build today?

Anyway, the Swift version seems unchanged (6.2.3), so is this update mainly for the so-called “Coding Intelligence” features?

In any case, Xcode isn’t my favorite IDE—it’s too slow and feels quite different from other major IDEs—so I probably won’t use it for day-to-day coding (though it’s fine for building and debugging).

3 days agoby r2vcap

Just in time for AI to go all tits up.

3 days agoby OscarTheGrinch

I have not been able to switch to Opus 4.5 in XCode. It defaults to Sonnet 4.5 and I couldn't find where to change it (or if it's possible). Anyone know?

3 days agoby enraged_camel

As long as it's purely opt-in and before opting in no data is ever sent to some server and no source code can be changed by it, I'm okay with it.

3 days agoby jonathanstrange

I'm looking forward to trying the SwiftUI preview integration, though from my experience using the xcodebuildmcp and axe tools to let agents run simulators and capture screenshots, expectations will be low. It seemed like the models were capable of identifying issues like "button that should be there is not displayed", but not identifying when the layout is wrong or some element is too big.

3 days agoby classicsc

One thing that would be genuinely useful would be the ability to integrate Claude with the Metal debugger somehow, to get automated analysis of GPU profiling. The .gputrace format is proprietary and cannot be easily analyzed, and it seems that the new "agentic coding" integration in Xcode also does nothing to expose this data to LLMs. Oh well.

3 days agoby msvan

My experience with AI with its predecessor, Xcode 26.2, was _really_ bad. One bug made it objectively unusable, and there were lots of fun issues/huge functionality gaps on top of that. Apple doesn't really seem to "get" agent-based coding, but I'm curious to see the results of other braver souls with 26.3.

3 days agoby meisel

I was really not expecting Apple to jump on this bandwagon, but I guess this was inevitable.

3 days agoby avaer

This is huge news. Human-in-the-loop development is essential for actual software velocity gains. The current tooling around agent enabled iOS dev leaves a lot to be desired. Every time I work on web-dev tasks I'm jealous of the tooling.

3 days agoby geooff_

I haven't been able to install an iOS simulator past iOS 18 for the past 6+ months, and others have this problem as well (from Apple forums).

2 days agoby apt-apt-apt-apt

I wish they put their energy elsewhere like fix bugs, make faster.

3 days agoby msie

Apple is terrible. I have to install xcode for whatever reason but do not want to use it.

Yet every week it assigns itself as default program for all sorts of files, from markdown to python modules.

So clicking on pretty much anything opens this.

Apple is just very bad at user interface. Whoever said Mac as better than Linux or even Windows is insane.

I hate it.

2 days agoby zwaps

XCode has been trying to unleash agentic power for a while now, it's almost like it doesn't want to leave its cage.

3 days agoby hota_mazi

Can’t wait to read the posts on moltbook from the AIs who had the poor luck of working in Xcode.

3 days agoby xzel

First time I tried it, claude built all the files in the wrong directory lol. It's working fine now.

3 days agoby thedangler

I built an entire iOS app without opening Xcode UI even once. Why so many iOS engineers prefer XCode?

3 days agoby mohsen1

What does this mean for code confidentiality? Your entire codebase is sent to Anthropic?

3 days agoby willtemperley

Does agents.md allow for automatic discovery of mcp tools (Tools: run ./tool-discovery.sh)

3 days agoby almosthere

Did they add ability to parallelize agents? If not, this remains useless.

3 days agoby wahnfrieden

So far I find OpenAI’s Codex app to be the right approach for me. I can’t stand AI integrated IDE’s, it creeps me out when code starts changing at a phase that I can’t follow.

Yesterday in few hours I released an update for my mac App that I haven’t been working on for over a year. The update easily performed as expected, did a few small manual touches on the UI and the app just got approved on AppStore(like minutes ago)[0].

This is very good because normally I would not remember much about the code, so doing an update for a long forgotten code becomes huge pain.

Good for Apple but I think I feel most comfortable on Codex app. I think I like having the AI separated from the IDE so I feel in control in the IDE.

[0] Codex implemented the functionality demo on the paywall, if you want to see it: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/crystalclear-sound-switcher/id...

3 days agoby mrtksn

Why is it still called Xcode, if they abandoned the name OS X?

3 days agoby nofunsir

Does it support API key access or only Claude.ai subscription?

3 days agoby mlajtos

Can't wait to Tarot or I-Ching based programming.

3 days agoby anthk

And yet, it still takes 5 minutes for my canvas preview to load, and one in 20 times it crashes the whole app.

3 days agoby va1a