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.
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.
I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates?
As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.
I don't know how did you achieve it, but I was doing it countless times.
Open with -> other -> enable all applications -> always open with.
For a short while it works, but somehow, something always reverts it back to xcode. Maybe it is restart. Maybe it is little evil cron job discreetly changes it back to xcode, but I was never able to get rid of it. It is happening to me on many different machines since Sierra. One calm day I casually double-click an STL or JSON and it prompts me to install some xcode packages, and I get angry at the machine.
There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive.
I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools.
select in finder the file that currently opens with XCode, then press Cmd+i. It opens the information panel. There in the Open with section, you can chose the app and then also Change all to not use XCode.
You're right that you can fix it via Get Info → Change All.
I know the procedure.
The issue is that Xcode updates and macOS updates tend to reset those associations back. There's a long-running Apple Community thread titled literally "Stop hijacking file extensions with xcode" ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253702137?sortBy=rank ) and another I saw recently where a user documents their .md associations reverting after closing their laptop lid.
It's not universal, but it's not delusion either.
The deeper annoyance is extensionless files and edge cases -- log files, build artifacts, random output from scripts ... where there's no clean association to override.
Those fall through to whatever macOS thinks is clever, which is often Xcode.
As for "why should Apple provide it" -- because the company was founded by a guy named Steve who believed that details and care matter. Someone who said how the insides of a computer looks is as important as the outside and nagged his partner until the circuits looked right in their home-brew project.
Also yes, fair point, I should just fix it and stop complaining.
There was a time I was interested in building for MacOS. Installing, opening and trying to use Xcode killed that pretty quick. I've never seen an IDE this behind in terms of usability from the competition.
Where ${whatever} is in {plain-text, json, source-code, ...}. I'm sure there's a way to automate this through parsing `lsregister -dump`, but have a script I run on every Mac I have that sets TextEdit as the default instead of XCode for a bunch of file types :-)
You're being too kind. It feels like a 8 cores worth of parallel busy loops to me!
I bet Alan Dye insisted they put it in there so users can pause their busy to gaze at and appreciate his artistically minimal unpainted Liquid Glass window frame.
The hijacking of file associations is one of the most awful and malicious things about macOS. You can set it to whatever you want, when Apple decide they want to, your CSVs will go to Numbers, JSONs go to Xcode.
Multiple config files of Xcode projects are not publicly documented as far as I remember and personally I have preferred to require my agents not to modify them out of fear it might break something and be hard to fix. I don't know how agentic programming will work in Xcode but I would expect it to do it using a safer approach, so that's also another case where it might have an advantage.
Your workflow looks very interesting especially the describe_ui part, are you already able to do this today?
I still open Xcode for every branch after having Claude do an initial implementation, to review the changes using its version editor, step through code using the IDE’s various code navigation features, and build/run to manually validate the changes. I do have claude analyze and test, though.
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.
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.
> I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points.
This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. A decade ago I used to develop in PyCharm for websites, and Visual Studio .Net for desktop apps. Then I had to learn XCode for a mobile app.
It was a surreal experience, like going back ten years in UX, while at the same time dealing with a myriad of modern but artificial limitations and breaking changes that meant the app needed frequent housekeeping even when its features remained unchanged.
For a company that gets a huge part of its revenue on its oversized App Store tax, developers, and their tooling, should be one of their highest priorities IMO. Instead, we get Kafkaesque situations like "my app doesn't compile today... oh, I need to open my Apple Developer account in the browser and accept a new little change in their kilometric EULA that I always pretend I've read carefully". Things like this could be handled better.
Edit: I also had to learn Android Studio for another app, and the experience had less friction overall, but that could mean that I've also learned to work around the shortcomings of JetBrains IDEs. Google is undeniably more developer-friendly than Apple IMO, though.
Honestly, that just sounds like it does things in an unfamiliar (to you) way. That's the flip side of the coin "This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings".
There is no perfect IDE. They all have problems / are inadequate / get in the way. I absolutely loathe IntelliJ IDEA for example, and think Eclipse is needlessly complex (though I'd like their code-indentation/formatting UI to replace the one in Xcode).
Honestly, Xcode gets a lot of bad comments, but it works pretty well for me and the debugging tools are pretty much top-notch if you take the time to learn them.
I started a project on January 5th. Running sloc right now I see:
First time I tried it, I realised there is no way to have a terminal emulator panel. A bloody terminal. Like the most basic feature you could integrate into an IDE. No thank you.
I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ?
Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used to or something. I've got 3 4k screens connected to a Mac Studio here, and plenty of space for a terminal or four to be running on-screen at the same time and in windows that don't obscure the things I want to look at. I guess if you code on an MBP and space is limited, it might be easier to switch to ? But I generally want that space for my debugger and console-app i/o. I think it'd just get in the way...
Because I like to get project-aware completions, or run pre-configured tools from the IDE in an actual shell, for example.
Also, when working on multiple projects, it’s much easier to have shells attached to a specific project that I can toggle with a keyboard shortcut to get process output or Claude right next to the code I’m looking at.
I come from Linux land so I'm used to things being lightning fast, so using software on a Mac requires a thousand workarounds. A terminal integrated into the IDE is one of those necessary workarounds.
MacOS has very very slow slow window- and desktop- switching (over one FULL second to switch from one desktop to another - this is not a joke!) so having a terminal integrated into the same application is very useful for maintaining flow for users developing on a single-screen Macbook.
I guess I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. I don’t often switch desktops - I tend to keep a project on a desktop, and there’s enough real-estate for everything I need for that project right there - and I don’t work on more than one project at a time.
Window switching is instantaneous though, and I do that a lot
As you said, it's the set up. I'm almost exclusively using a single monitor, which works well when there's zero cost to switching desktops.
For your use case, imagine if the Window switcher, instead of being instantaneous, was a ~1200ms animation which blocked all key presses during the animation.
I use the built-in terminal "panel" inside VS Code/Cursor all the time. It's next to some other useful tab panels. Great for when you need to run commands for the current project but still want to chat in the sidebar or edit something else while it runs.
Sometimes I'll use Ghostty at the same time and switch between the two. Just depends on what I'm trying to do at the moment.
Nothing wrong with maintaining all the context you need in a single window instead of alt+tabbing to different apps, especially for those not engulfed by three 4K displays.
I'll use both depending. Things which benefit from staying in the window context in the IDE window I use the IDE one, things which don't as much or are only tangentially related in an iTerm2/Terminal/Foot window (depending on the platform I'm on).
I expect others do things differently for different reasons as much as much as I expect an IDE to support more than one type of user.
> Because I like to get project-aware completions, or run pre-configured tools from the IDE in an actual shell, for example.
> Also, when working on multiple projects, it’s much easier to have shells attached to a specific project that I can toggle with a keyboard shortcut to get process output or Claude right next to the code I’m looking at.
Window switching is bad enough on MacOS, especially if you have multiple projects open at the same time.
Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating.
First, the performance is just bad. The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day.
The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me run weird functions and interact with stuff" UIs like terminal, debug and logs are in the bottom panel. Or maybe a new tab in the main workspace area?
The SwiftUI preview canvas can't be floated as a separate window, making it all but useless on anything smaller than a 16" MBP (and only barely usable there). In fact, I think it might be impossible to use Xcode in multiple screens altogether…?
Old simulator versions and cache files hang around forever, you need a third-party app like DevCleaner just to keep your storage from filling with nonsense. Cryptic messages like "copying symbols to device"… clear-cache that doesn't seem to clear-cache, that stupid list UI for info.plist…
I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about PNPM package management, but you can always just delete `node_modules` and reinstall and count on things working. Swift package management is a cryptic mess, and their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it. Like the info.plist thing, a lot of Xcode is based on a developer UI philosophy from the Mac Classic days that has mostly been abandoned by the rest of the world.
Mostly, I think the vitriol surrounding Xcode is that Apple seems to think they're doing a good job; meanwhile their most ardent and adept users are insisting that they are not. Same boat as MacOS, really.
My pain points are mostly in the CPU debugger (since I'm not using much of the actual "IDE features" of Xcode except the regular edit-compile-debug loop anyway.
Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI? This problem seems to go back to the ancient times, but it gets worse and worse the bloatier macOS UI processes become (e.g. the more system frameworks they load at start).
The debugger variable view panel is so bare bones that it looks like it's ripped out straight from an 80's home computer monitor program.
When debug-stepping, the debugger frontend is quite often stuck for 10s of seconds at completely unpredictable places waiting for the debugger to respond (it feels like a timeout).
Step-debugging in general feels sluggish even compared to VSCode with lldb.
For comparison, VS2026 isn't exactly a lightweight IDE either, but debugging sessions start instantly, debug-stepping is immediate, and the CPU debugger is much more feature rich than Xcode's. While in Xcode, everything feels like it's been added as a checklist item, but then never actually used by the Xcode team (I do wonder what they're using to develop Xcode, I doubt that they are dogfooding their own work).
The one good and useful thing about Xcode is the Metal debugger though.
Yes, I develop C++ on XCode and Visual Studio. I've recently started using XCode more because the performance on my Windows tower has become abominable in the past couple years and the M1 laptop is still snappy.
XCode is just terrible compared to Visual Studio.
As you said, there are weird beachballs all the time both while stepping and while waiting for the application to stop at a breakpoint (in cases where it happens instantly running under VS on Windows).
The Jump to Definition seems to have gotten flakier. Or maybe it's always been terrible relative to Visual Studio, IDK. But regardless a lot of times I'm just going by memory and Cmd+F on XCode - Jump to Definition and Cmd+Shift+o are just not getting there.
The Variables pane in the Debugger often just fails to actually ... display anything for any of the variables when stopped at a breakpoint. Sometimes it will appear after stepping a couple lines, sometimes it won't.
The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.
I am an emacs guy so it's not like I'm disposed to like Visual Studio. Visual Studio's quality has slipped a little too. But XCode feels straight-up amateurish in comparison to it. That said, at least Apple is actually exposing the capabilities of the IDE to their LLM integration offering. This is an improvement over the abortion that is Copilot integration in Visual Studio.
> Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI?
This is so you can see function names for system frameworks. You can step into them if you want too even if Xcode tries to stop you doing it by default.
Historically one of the big problems with Xcode has been that they only dogfood. There’s people on the team that have not touched any other IDE in decades. They’ve gotten used to all of the quirks, and just don’t really know that things could be better. Every new improvement has to be designed from scratch rather than just ripping off what other IDEs do better.
Apple internally has structured their projects to not run into all of the debugger performance cliffs, but don’t provide any guidance on how to do the same thing and don’t proactively fix the problems they’ve avoided.
Every time I’ve talked to someone who has worked on Xcode they’ve expressed the opinion that Xcode is best-in-class and they simply don’t understand why people disagree.
While I don't quite have the same problems as others have, there are some pain points.
Stepping through the debugger too fast will sometimes put the debugger in a weird state where step never breaks again and all other breakpoints stop working.
Git pull through the UI with stash and merge can blow away your local changes if there is a conflict. The changes aren't stashed. They're just gone.
Xcode likes to sometimes recompile files that haven't changed slowing everything down, sometimes significantly depending on the file. No idea why.
It can get very confused if you're missing a parenthesis in the wrong place in a SwiftUI View leading to opaque swift compiler errors about code being too complex.
Even mildly complex use of a swift #Predicate will cause an error about it being too complex forcing you to break them down into smaller pieces and even then it takes far too long to build even on a brand new machine.
The simulators are quite slow to start/update/run and xcode sometimes fails to shut them down completely when quitting leading to them just continually running eating memory unless you kill the processes manually.
The simulators also are really limited in their functionality. No background processes, spotlight, network degradation simulation, out of memory killer, etc.
The profiler sometimes just fails to start an app correctly, immediately ending a run forcing you to close the profiler and reopen it again before it'll start working.
Symbol refactor (rename) can be painfully slow where the UI just locks up until it can find all the references.
Xcode likes to duplicate package dependencies in xcodeproj. It just creates new hashes for the same library and adds it as a dependency over and over again, so when the link phase happens, it adds libraries repeatedly over and over and over again unless you manually clear them out. Not sure what causes this, perhaps updating the version or merges between users.
Mostly the fact that for the past 10 years they've been adding new features but never finished them and taken the time to properly bugfix them along the way. Just a few I ran into recently:
- Interface Builder is stuck in early 2010s. Not only is the property panel missing half of options we now take for granted everywhere else (like corner radius), it also randomly won't read fonts in the current project, will crash the entire IDE if you Cmd-Z a big change (things like unembedding a view) and half the UI is still not rendered the way it will be on the phone. Yes, Swift UI exists, but most bigger apps are still XIBs and Storyboards and it's going to remain that way for quite some time.
- Autocomplete is a hit or miss. Very much like the mid-90s Microsoft IDEs where you'd get totally useless results until you've typed the whole line out already. It can be done well, look at AppCode.
- Syntax highlighting feels pretty much the same. Randomly flashes on and off, often doesn't highlight until return is pressed, takes a long time to load on large files etc.
- Git integration is by far the worst I've seen out of any IDE and I've seen many. I'd go as far as to say that SourceSafe integration in VB6 was done better. Just the whole layout, modal-on-modal returning to the first modal on an error in the second and so on. It's crashed when rebasing a few times too, I don't trust it with larger operations since.
- Documentation browser is this annoying little window with semi-useful search. But don't worry, the docs in there are useless anyways. I could go on and on about their approach to docs but maybe next time.
Don't even get me started on performance. Things like switching file tabs should be instant by now but there are still noticeable delays for larger files and IB screens. Plus there's now two kinds of tabs (app-level and file-level) to add to the mess.
I haven't been using Xcode continuously for that long. But I recall being a pleasure every time I use it. Except when it crashed occasionally, but that was luckily rare.
It sounds like OP doesn't like the way Xcode does things differently to other IDE's.
I sometimes have to build code for the apple watch. Getting it to pair with XCode is incredibly frustrating and is the opposite of what you would expect.
Xcode is abysmal on a large codebase. Freezes constantly on operations. The most useful features stall the entire program, things like: test navigator, quick open files, debugger, etc..
But I agree that Xcode runs fine on small projects and recent version feel stable compare to past releases.
as of Xcode 16, the default uses actual directories for folders instead of file references in the pbxproj file, which eliminates those annoying merge conflicts. at my work it took a bit of effort to move the project over to using folders but it was 100% worth it.
It has become a meme to complain about Xcode. When I ask devs what they don't like about it it is usually very subjective or a misunderstanding. Take it all with a grain of salt. It is one of the most advanced and amazing IDEs out there IMO.
There is barely anything wrong with Xcode. I'd rather it than the bloat that is Android Studio or Visual Code. Haters gonna hate. I also write apps for every Apple platform and really no complaints except I wouldn't mind a better Vim mode (it does however suffice!)
This is not hype-chasing. AI is a key part of software engineering now. For this to be absent from Xcode would be an existential risk for the future of the product.
It most certainly is not, lol. That's the hype that the parent was referring to. Most people have found AI to be a detriment, not a benefit, to their work.
No, it isn’t. There are irresponsible voices in the community who claim that it is, but they always find convenient ways to omit the downsides (on both the tech and effects on society as a whole).
Claude Code from the terminal is servicable enough. Yet I cannot open the same project from different versions of Xcode without some manual finnagling. Xcode is at no existential risk for it is the only tool you are allowed to use to reach your audience on the app store. Don’t be ridiculous. The reason Xcode is as broken as it is today is because of the same exact reason. The developer experience need not be great, as long as you can coax the trash fire of a toolchain to upload a signed app to AppStoreConnect, there is 0 incentive for Apple to put any time into the tool.
Sure, it's a dumpster fire. But human engineers work on it just fine without investing man-decades into refactoring it into some shrine to the software engineer's craft.
The whole point of AI, in our parent company's eyes, is for no one to mention "code quality" as something impeding the delivery of features, yesterday, ever.
Claude, with a modicum of guidance from an engineer familiar with your monolith, could could write comprehensive unit tests of your existing system, then refactor it into coherent composable parts, in a day.
Not doing so while senior management demands the use of AI augmentation seems odd.
It's a damn shame, the hardware is pretty amazing and I wish they just had like one person who cared about Linux working at Apple and then make a small promise to not rugpull Linux users.
I think one thing that shows Apple's position towards open source in general is that they don't allow their employees to work on open source projects in their own time and using their own equipment. Before anyone brings up that California labor code provision, it has a carve-out for "activities that relate to the employer's business". Since Apple is big enough and has their fingers in enough pies that they can credibly say that virtually any open source projects developed by Apple employees are related to their business, I would be wary about fighting them in court over this.
This is such a ridiculous rule, it should make silicon valley collectively reach for their torches and pitchforks. Why would you ever accept something so egregiously overreaching like an employer dictating what you can do and cannot do, in your free time, with your own equipment??
I don't think this is it. I can only find one tweet from an Apple employee who said that they can't work on OSS and was looking for new maintainers. I am not sold that this is the whole truth.
I think the bigger issue is contributing to OSS for putting Linux on a Macbook for example could be considered leaking company secrets since you would have access to internals. I find it hard to believe that Apple would go after someone for making a open source calculator app.
I worked for a non-FAANG company in California and the onboarding/exit process about side projects was one of the most annoying thing I've had to deal with. As far as why would silicon valley peeps put up with it...money. Big corps are worried that you will implement something you learned while on the job into one of your side hustles. Not defending it, just stating a bit of reasoning.
For the record, I started using Xcode before it was called that and people have said this almost every year since. As I recall there was a big hit to its quality when they converted it to obj-c’s short lived garbage collection, and it felt like it never got back to reliable after that.
In what way is "AI being shoved down you throat"? Did you think that SwiftUI was shoved down your throat? Did you think that CoreData was shoved down your throat. Perhaps develop a more nuanced critique.
For the last ~15 years or so I only use Xcode on the command line sporadically. Prior to that I had to endure the full Xcode experience. I actually liked it between crashes!
Idk, I feel like these coding assistant features aren’t that hard to add, but can provide a lot of value to developers. Most or all popular IDEs now support similar features.
I don’t disagree that Apple could use a major focus on bug fixing across their platforms right now though.
Yeah, I'd like to see another OS release like to Snow Leopard (10.6.x) which had as a prime focus simplification and so forth w/o adding many (any?) features.
True that Xcode needs yet another rebuild from scratch. If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work. However adding support for Claude is still a huge win. Could lead the way to making the transition to a sane IDE possible / reasonable. This would require leadership that’s completely absent at the company.
> If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work.
Ever attempted this before at a large company and had success with it? I think I can count four times so far in ~15 years where people attempted to rewrite something medium/large-scale from scratch around me, was a success once, although scope was drastically cut at the end so almost a stretch to call it a success.
You are of course correct. It's not likely to succeed. "Could work" doesn't mean high chance of success. I was trying to imply the opposite. It's just that Xcode has so much baggage that the previous attempts have been very compromised.
A full rebuild might be throwing out the baby with the bath water. As someone who’s been using it since it was known as Project Builder, bugs seem mostly concentrated in the XIB/Storyboard editor (formerly known as a Interface Builder), SwiftUI live preview, and SwiftPM package resolve.
In a project with code-only UIKit, only a smattering of SwiftUI for small components, and minimal dependencies, Xcode isn’t too bad of an experience and I’d say comparable to and in some ways better than Android Studio (that localization XML editor, not mention Gradle… ugh).
Because it's developed by JetBrains (with Google contributions), a company whose main business is writing really good IDEs. Apple on contrary is a hardware company that happens to build software. If they had delegated the XCode development to JetBrains, we would have had a great IDE for macOS/iOS development too. AppCode was damn good with zero support from Apple side, and despite the fact that JetBrains always needed to catch-up with Apple's breaking changes.
I've not found Android Studio to be particularly amazing for those kinds of features either. Sometimes they work, sometimes they half-work, and on occasion I've had them do the wrong thing entirely.
A lot of refactoring work across both platforms ends up being manual one way or another.
From my years of iOS development—and based on https://xcodereleases.com typically ships two major Xcode updates each year:
- X.0 (September): bumps Swift, SDK versions, etc. It also tends to have a noticeably longer beta cycle than other releases.
- X.3 or X.4 (around March): bumps Swift again and raises the minimum required macOS version.
Other releases in between are usually smaller updates that add features or fix bugs, but they don’t involve major toolchain-level or fundamental changes.
Today’s release doesn’t bump the Swift version, which suggests the core toolchain is essentially the same as Xcode 26.2—so it makes sense that the minimum macOS version wasn’t raised either.
Agreed - I tried installing Xcode26.3 on my mac running Sequoia and there's no "intelligence" pane in Xcode settings to connect Claude like there is in the docs.
That makes sense. The latest Sequoia update can't understand it's done updating and shows the "welcome" message every time I boot. I won't upgrade to Tahoe until absolutely necessary. It's like Apple is doing everything in its power to alienate their users.
The same thing they’re doing with Gemini, creating custom versions, is likely what they’ve done with Claude and OpenAI models as well. They’re likely evaluating all of them internally with employees all the time.
When I see Activity Monitor that doesn't show tabs until you nearly go full screen – all I can think is that this shit product was built even before vibecoding was a thing. Truly ahead of its time.
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.
This is true of the CLIs that start with `xcode` but not of the CLIs that start with `swift`. As `swift-format` and `swift-test` have come into their own, they're just as reliable as any other language ecosystem. And the difference is indeed staggering. I wrote this guide last summer on extracting all your app's code into a (nonsensically necessary) Swift package dependency simply so you can test it with Swift Testing https://justin.searls.co/posts/i-made-xcodes-tests-60-times-...
"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.
I tried the three provider types with xcodes current agent integration pane and just trying to use them crashed xcode itself so badly that the ide couldn’t even be launched.
FTA: “In addition to these built-in integrations, Xcode 26.3 makes its capabilities available through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives developers the flexibility to use any compatible agent or tool with Xcode.”
I came here to ask this question. I find the existing agentic coding integraton to be clunky and slow. I've had much better luck with my Xcode projects just using my agentic coding tool of choice in the CLI.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Why would you ever want a debugger that isn't integrated with the code editor..? I will never not want to debug code when the current breakpoint and evaluated expressions aren't visible in the code itself.
Worth noting that "API key access" vs "subscription" has significant cost implications for heavy users.
Claude.ai Pro is $20/month flat. But if you're doing serious agent-assisted coding (multi-file refactors, iterative debugging loops), you can blow through $50-100/day in API costs.
The math changes depending on usage patterns. Subscription makes sense for interactive coding sessions. API keys make sense if you're batch processing or running agents autonomously overnight.
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.
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?
I don't think it's a serious question or the person is very young.
To answer the question. Xcode is the default IDE for iOS development. The default option will always be a practical choice.
JetBrains or Anthropic could get bought by a larger company or dismantled by the government somehow. Should anything happen to Apple (unlikely as that may seem) the entire iOS ecosystem would be gone as well negating any need for a default.
My annoyance is that it sounds like I can't just use Claude Code directly in XCode? I like how Zed does it, it's not perfect, but it works really nicely.
Xcode is using the Claude Agent SDK, which means that you "get the full power of Claude Code directly in Xcode—including subagents, background tasks, and plugins—all without leaving the IDE¹". I assume that means iOS development plug-ins like Axiom² should work as well.
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.
I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates?
As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.
>Not once has it ever changed on me.
I don't know how did you achieve it, but I was doing it countless times.
Open with -> other -> enable all applications -> always open with.
For a short while it works, but somehow, something always reverts it back to xcode. Maybe it is restart. Maybe it is little evil cron job discreetly changes it back to xcode, but I was never able to get rid of it. It is happening to me on many different machines since Sierra. One calm day I casually double-click an STL or JSON and it prompts me to install some xcode packages, and I get angry at the machine.
There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive.
I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools.
This has driven me to madness too.
> Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive.
They are the same Info.plist format as every other MacOS application.
select in finder the file that currently opens with XCode, then press Cmd+i. It opens the information panel. There in the Open with section, you can chose the app and then also Change all to not use XCode.
Not something I've ever experienced. Open As... Always works just fine.
You're right that you can fix it via Get Info → Change All.
I know the procedure.
The issue is that Xcode updates and macOS updates tend to reset those associations back. There's a long-running Apple Community thread titled literally "Stop hijacking file extensions with xcode" ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253702137?sortBy=rank ) and another I saw recently where a user documents their .md associations reverting after closing their laptop lid.
It's not universal, but it's not delusion either.
The deeper annoyance is extensionless files and edge cases -- log files, build artifacts, random output from scripts ... where there's no clean association to override.
Those fall through to whatever macOS thinks is clever, which is often Xcode.
As for "why should Apple provide it" -- because the company was founded by a guy named Steve who believed that details and care matter. Someone who said how the insides of a computer looks is as important as the outside and nagged his partner until the circuits looked right in their home-brew project.
Also yes, fair point, I should just fix it and stop complaining.
I failed at that today. Please forgive me.
There was a time I was interested in building for MacOS. Installing, opening and trying to use Xcode killed that pretty quick. I've never seen an IDE this behind in terms of usability from the competition.
I agree with you, it's infuriating. I think it's been loading faster recently (maybe?), but it still takes like 10 seconds.
To set file association stuff more easily than with the Finder GUI, you can run (with https://github.com/moretension/duti):
Where ${whatever} is in {plain-text, json, source-code, ...}. I'm sure there's a way to automate this through parsing `lsregister -dump`, but have a script I run on every Mac I have that sets TextEdit as the default instead of XCode for a bunch of file types :-)> sleep(rand())
You're being too kind. It feels like a 8 cores worth of parallel busy loops to me!
I bet Alan Dye insisted they put it in there so users can pause their busy to gaze at and appreciate his artistically minimal unpainted Liquid Glass window frame.
I like to take a few minutes to admire the content underneath/behind my sidebars
The hijacking of file associations is one of the most awful and malicious things about macOS. You can set it to whatever you want, when Apple decide they want to, your CSVs will go to Numbers, JSONs go to Xcode.
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.
Multiple config files of Xcode projects are not publicly documented as far as I remember and personally I have preferred to require my agents not to modify them out of fear it might break something and be hard to fix. I don't know how agentic programming will work in Xcode but I would expect it to do it using a safer approach, so that's also another case where it might have an advantage.
Your workflow looks very interesting especially the describe_ui part, are you already able to do this today?
Can XcodeBuildMCP spit out definitions of C++ symbols? Did Apple just accidentally release a LSP server for Xcode projects? That would be sick.
I still open Xcode for every branch after having Claude do an initial implementation, to review the changes using its version editor, step through code using the IDE’s various code navigation features, and build/run to manually validate the changes. I do have claude analyze and test, though.
I still haven't found a useful way to replicate preview when iterating quickly on a view (though it's an edge case)
XcodeMCP (Native MCP added in 26.3) Implements this with RenderPreview
RenderPreview: Builds and renders a SwiftUI #Preview, returns snapshot
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.
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?
> I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points.
This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. A decade ago I used to develop in PyCharm for websites, and Visual Studio .Net for desktop apps. Then I had to learn XCode for a mobile app.
It was a surreal experience, like going back ten years in UX, while at the same time dealing with a myriad of modern but artificial limitations and breaking changes that meant the app needed frequent housekeeping even when its features remained unchanged.
For a company that gets a huge part of its revenue on its oversized App Store tax, developers, and their tooling, should be one of their highest priorities IMO. Instead, we get Kafkaesque situations like "my app doesn't compile today... oh, I need to open my Apple Developer account in the browser and accept a new little change in their kilometric EULA that I always pretend I've read carefully". Things like this could be handled better.
Edit: I also had to learn Android Studio for another app, and the experience had less friction overall, but that could mean that I've also learned to work around the shortcomings of JetBrains IDEs. Google is undeniably more developer-friendly than Apple IMO, though.
Honestly, that just sounds like it does things in an unfamiliar (to you) way. That's the flip side of the coin "This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings".
There is no perfect IDE. They all have problems / are inadequate / get in the way. I absolutely loathe IntelliJ IDEA for example, and think Eclipse is needlessly complex (though I'd like their code-indentation/formatting UI to replace the one in Xcode).
Honestly, Xcode gets a lot of bad comments, but it works pretty well for me and the debugging tools are pretty much top-notch if you take the time to learn them.
I started a project on January 5th. Running sloc right now I see:
---------- Result ------------
Number of files read : 195----------------------------
That's a lot of code in just under a month (and none of it from AI tools), I don't think the IDE is getting in my way.
First time I tried it, I realised there is no way to have a terminal emulator panel. A bloody terminal. Like the most basic feature you could integrate into an IDE. No thank you.
I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ?
Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used to or something. I've got 3 4k screens connected to a Mac Studio here, and plenty of space for a terminal or four to be running on-screen at the same time and in windows that don't obscure the things I want to look at. I guess if you code on an MBP and space is limited, it might be easier to switch to ? But I generally want that space for my debugger and console-app i/o. I think it'd just get in the way...
Because I like to get project-aware completions, or run pre-configured tools from the IDE in an actual shell, for example.
Also, when working on multiple projects, it’s much easier to have shells attached to a specific project that I can toggle with a keyboard shortcut to get process output or Claude right next to the code I’m looking at.
I come from Linux land so I'm used to things being lightning fast, so using software on a Mac requires a thousand workarounds. A terminal integrated into the IDE is one of those necessary workarounds.
MacOS has very very slow slow window- and desktop- switching (over one FULL second to switch from one desktop to another - this is not a joke!) so having a terminal integrated into the same application is very useful for maintaining flow for users developing on a single-screen Macbook.
I guess I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. I don’t often switch desktops - I tend to keep a project on a desktop, and there’s enough real-estate for everything I need for that project right there - and I don’t work on more than one project at a time.
Window switching is instantaneous though, and I do that a lot
As you said, it's the set up. I'm almost exclusively using a single monitor, which works well when there's zero cost to switching desktops.
For your use case, imagine if the Window switcher, instead of being instantaneous, was a ~1200ms animation which blocked all key presses during the animation.
I use the built-in terminal "panel" inside VS Code/Cursor all the time. It's next to some other useful tab panels. Great for when you need to run commands for the current project but still want to chat in the sidebar or edit something else while it runs.
Sometimes I'll use Ghostty at the same time and switch between the two. Just depends on what I'm trying to do at the moment.
Nothing wrong with maintaining all the context you need in a single window instead of alt+tabbing to different apps, especially for those not engulfed by three 4K displays.
I'll use both depending. Things which benefit from staying in the window context in the IDE window I use the IDE one, things which don't as much or are only tangentially related in an iTerm2/Terminal/Foot window (depending on the platform I'm on).
I expect others do things differently for different reasons as much as much as I expect an IDE to support more than one type of user.
Even with IDEs that have a terminal view, I still much prefer using a separate terminal app.
Ha ha! You sound like a vi users asking an emacs user why the hell you need a shell window in emacs!
Oh you're why they add that. I just use a dedicated app. What's the benefit of putting it in the same window as the editor?
Replied on a sibling too, but:
> Because I like to get project-aware completions, or run pre-configured tools from the IDE in an actual shell, for example. > Also, when working on multiple projects, it’s much easier to have shells attached to a specific project that I can toggle with a keyboard shortcut to get process output or Claude right next to the code I’m looking at.
Window switching is bad enough on MacOS, especially if you have multiple projects open at the same time.
Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating.
First, the performance is just bad. The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day.
The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me run weird functions and interact with stuff" UIs like terminal, debug and logs are in the bottom panel. Or maybe a new tab in the main workspace area?
The SwiftUI preview canvas can't be floated as a separate window, making it all but useless on anything smaller than a 16" MBP (and only barely usable there). In fact, I think it might be impossible to use Xcode in multiple screens altogether…?
Old simulator versions and cache files hang around forever, you need a third-party app like DevCleaner just to keep your storage from filling with nonsense. Cryptic messages like "copying symbols to device"… clear-cache that doesn't seem to clear-cache, that stupid list UI for info.plist…
I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about PNPM package management, but you can always just delete `node_modules` and reinstall and count on things working. Swift package management is a cryptic mess, and their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it. Like the info.plist thing, a lot of Xcode is based on a developer UI philosophy from the Mac Classic days that has mostly been abandoned by the rest of the world.
Mostly, I think the vitriol surrounding Xcode is that Apple seems to think they're doing a good job; meanwhile their most ardent and adept users are insisting that they are not. Same boat as MacOS, really.
Nit: symbol files are copied from a device.
My pain points are mostly in the CPU debugger (since I'm not using much of the actual "IDE features" of Xcode except the regular edit-compile-debug loop anyway.
Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI? This problem seems to go back to the ancient times, but it gets worse and worse the bloatier macOS UI processes become (e.g. the more system frameworks they load at start).
The debugger variable view panel is so bare bones that it looks like it's ripped out straight from an 80's home computer monitor program.
When debug-stepping, the debugger frontend is quite often stuck for 10s of seconds at completely unpredictable places waiting for the debugger to respond (it feels like a timeout).
Step-debugging in general feels sluggish even compared to VSCode with lldb.
For comparison, VS2026 isn't exactly a lightweight IDE either, but debugging sessions start instantly, debug-stepping is immediate, and the CPU debugger is much more feature rich than Xcode's. While in Xcode, everything feels like it's been added as a checklist item, but then never actually used by the Xcode team (I do wonder what they're using to develop Xcode, I doubt that they are dogfooding their own work).
The one good and useful thing about Xcode is the Metal debugger though.
Yes, I develop C++ on XCode and Visual Studio. I've recently started using XCode more because the performance on my Windows tower has become abominable in the past couple years and the M1 laptop is still snappy.
XCode is just terrible compared to Visual Studio.
As you said, there are weird beachballs all the time both while stepping and while waiting for the application to stop at a breakpoint (in cases where it happens instantly running under VS on Windows).
The Jump to Definition seems to have gotten flakier. Or maybe it's always been terrible relative to Visual Studio, IDK. But regardless a lot of times I'm just going by memory and Cmd+F on XCode - Jump to Definition and Cmd+Shift+o are just not getting there.
The Variables pane in the Debugger often just fails to actually ... display anything for any of the variables when stopped at a breakpoint. Sometimes it will appear after stepping a couple lines, sometimes it won't.
The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.
I am an emacs guy so it's not like I'm disposed to like Visual Studio. Visual Studio's quality has slipped a little too. But XCode feels straight-up amateurish in comparison to it. That said, at least Apple is actually exposing the capabilities of the IDE to their LLM integration offering. This is an improvement over the abortion that is Copilot integration in Visual Studio.
> The Debugger is even flakier than usual when Lambdas are involved.
You can’t step into a lambda stored in a std::function
Absolute nightmare if you don’t know which lambda it might be so you can set a breakpoint in it.
Honestly, compared to Visual Studio, Xcode is 20 years behind.
> Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI?
This is so you can see function names for system frameworks. You can step into them if you want too even if Xcode tries to stop you doing it by default.
Historically one of the big problems with Xcode has been that they only dogfood. There’s people on the team that have not touched any other IDE in decades. They’ve gotten used to all of the quirks, and just don’t really know that things could be better. Every new improvement has to be designed from scratch rather than just ripping off what other IDEs do better.
Apple internally has structured their projects to not run into all of the debugger performance cliffs, but don’t provide any guidance on how to do the same thing and don’t proactively fix the problems they’ve avoided.
Every time I’ve talked to someone who has worked on Xcode they’ve expressed the opinion that Xcode is best-in-class and they simply don’t understand why people disagree.
While I don't quite have the same problems as others have, there are some pain points.
Stepping through the debugger too fast will sometimes put the debugger in a weird state where step never breaks again and all other breakpoints stop working.
Git pull through the UI with stash and merge can blow away your local changes if there is a conflict. The changes aren't stashed. They're just gone.
Xcode likes to sometimes recompile files that haven't changed slowing everything down, sometimes significantly depending on the file. No idea why.
It can get very confused if you're missing a parenthesis in the wrong place in a SwiftUI View leading to opaque swift compiler errors about code being too complex.
Even mildly complex use of a swift #Predicate will cause an error about it being too complex forcing you to break them down into smaller pieces and even then it takes far too long to build even on a brand new machine.
The simulators are quite slow to start/update/run and xcode sometimes fails to shut them down completely when quitting leading to them just continually running eating memory unless you kill the processes manually.
The simulators also are really limited in their functionality. No background processes, spotlight, network degradation simulation, out of memory killer, etc.
The profiler sometimes just fails to start an app correctly, immediately ending a run forcing you to close the profiler and reopen it again before it'll start working.
Symbol refactor (rename) can be painfully slow where the UI just locks up until it can find all the references.
Xcode likes to duplicate package dependencies in xcodeproj. It just creates new hashes for the same library and adds it as a dependency over and over again, so when the link phase happens, it adds libraries repeatedly over and over and over again unless you manually clear them out. Not sure what causes this, perhaps updating the version or merges between users.
Mostly the fact that for the past 10 years they've been adding new features but never finished them and taken the time to properly bugfix them along the way. Just a few I ran into recently:
- Interface Builder is stuck in early 2010s. Not only is the property panel missing half of options we now take for granted everywhere else (like corner radius), it also randomly won't read fonts in the current project, will crash the entire IDE if you Cmd-Z a big change (things like unembedding a view) and half the UI is still not rendered the way it will be on the phone. Yes, Swift UI exists, but most bigger apps are still XIBs and Storyboards and it's going to remain that way for quite some time.
- Autocomplete is a hit or miss. Very much like the mid-90s Microsoft IDEs where you'd get totally useless results until you've typed the whole line out already. It can be done well, look at AppCode.
- Syntax highlighting feels pretty much the same. Randomly flashes on and off, often doesn't highlight until return is pressed, takes a long time to load on large files etc.
- Git integration is by far the worst I've seen out of any IDE and I've seen many. I'd go as far as to say that SourceSafe integration in VB6 was done better. Just the whole layout, modal-on-modal returning to the first modal on an error in the second and so on. It's crashed when rebasing a few times too, I don't trust it with larger operations since.
- Documentation browser is this annoying little window with semi-useful search. But don't worry, the docs in there are useless anyways. I could go on and on about their approach to docs but maybe next time.
Don't even get me started on performance. Things like switching file tabs should be instant by now but there are still noticeable delays for larger files and IB screens. Plus there's now two kinds of tabs (app-level and file-level) to add to the mess.
I haven't been using Xcode continuously for that long. But I recall being a pleasure every time I use it. Except when it crashed occasionally, but that was luckily rare.
It sounds like OP doesn't like the way Xcode does things differently to other IDE's.
I also enjoy working with XCode. It has glitches and it is a bit slow, but I love the look and feel and it I am positively inspired working with it.
I sometimes have to build code for the apple watch. Getting it to pair with XCode is incredibly frustrating and is the opposite of what you would expect.
Xcode is abysmal on a large codebase. Freezes constantly on operations. The most useful features stall the entire program, things like: test navigator, quick open files, debugger, etc..
But I agree that Xcode runs fine on small projects and recent version feel stable compare to past releases.
If nothing else, an update to the pbxproj file format would be life changing. Most of my time fighting git is dealing with project file merges.
as of Xcode 16, the default uses actual directories for folders instead of file references in the pbxproj file, which eliminates those annoying merge conflicts. at my work it took a bit of effort to move the project over to using folders but it was 100% worth it.
It has become a meme to complain about Xcode. When I ask devs what they don't like about it it is usually very subjective or a misunderstanding. Take it all with a grain of salt. It is one of the most advanced and amazing IDEs out there IMO.
There is barely anything wrong with Xcode. I'd rather it than the bloat that is Android Studio or Visual Code. Haters gonna hate. I also write apps for every Apple platform and really no complaints except I wouldn't mind a better Vim mode (it does however suffice!)
its almost tautological that a person who has been using xcode for 10 years would be incapable of seeing any flaws in it
This is not hype-chasing. AI is a key part of software engineering now. For this to be absent from Xcode would be an existential risk for the future of the product.
> AI is a key part of software engineering now.
It most certainly is not, lol. That's the hype that the parent was referring to. Most people have found AI to be a detriment, not a benefit, to their work.
You’d have to be deeply ensconced in a particular kind of bubble to hold this belief.
...or you have to be deeply entrenched in another kind of bubble to believe the opposite xD
> AI is a key part of software engineering now
No, it isn’t. There are irresponsible voices in the community who claim that it is, but they always find convenient ways to omit the downsides (on both the tech and effects on society as a whole).
Claude Code from the terminal is servicable enough. Yet I cannot open the same project from different versions of Xcode without some manual finnagling. Xcode is at no existential risk for it is the only tool you are allowed to use to reach your audience on the app store. Don’t be ridiculous. The reason Xcode is as broken as it is today is because of the same exact reason. The developer experience need not be great, as long as you can coax the trash fire of a toolchain to upload a signed app to AppStoreConnect, there is 0 incentive for Apple to put any time into the tool.
For a certain-size project it really is not.
Single files in our codebase already blow the Copilot query token limit.
Great, Anthropic taught Claude to grep. On our project, it's still useless because it can't use the semantic search in the IDE.
> Single files in our codebase already blow the Copilot query token limit.
This tells more about your code quality that about copilot, and I'm not a fan of copilot
I disagree.
Sure, it's a dumpster fire. But human engineers work on it just fine without investing man-decades into refactoring it into some shrine to the software engineer's craft.
The whole point of AI, in our parent company's eyes, is for no one to mention "code quality" as something impeding the delivery of features, yesterday, ever.
Claude, with a modicum of guidance from an engineer familiar with your monolith, could could write comprehensive unit tests of your existing system, then refactor it into coherent composable parts, in a day.
Not doing so while senior management demands the use of AI augmentation seems odd.
A lot of macOS needs that. There are some terrific ideas under the hood, but it’s as if people left halfway through implementing them.
It's a damn shame, the hardware is pretty amazing and I wish they just had like one person who cared about Linux working at Apple and then make a small promise to not rugpull Linux users.
I think one thing that shows Apple's position towards open source in general is that they don't allow their employees to work on open source projects in their own time and using their own equipment. Before anyone brings up that California labor code provision, it has a carve-out for "activities that relate to the employer's business". Since Apple is big enough and has their fingers in enough pies that they can credibly say that virtually any open source projects developed by Apple employees are related to their business, I would be wary about fighting them in court over this.
This is such a ridiculous rule, it should make silicon valley collectively reach for their torches and pitchforks. Why would you ever accept something so egregiously overreaching like an employer dictating what you can do and cannot do, in your free time, with your own equipment??
I don't think this is it. I can only find one tweet from an Apple employee who said that they can't work on OSS and was looking for new maintainers. I am not sold that this is the whole truth.
I think the bigger issue is contributing to OSS for putting Linux on a Macbook for example could be considered leaking company secrets since you would have access to internals. I find it hard to believe that Apple would go after someone for making a open source calculator app.
They can and do.
I worked for a non-FAANG company in California and the onboarding/exit process about side projects was one of the most annoying thing I've had to deal with. As far as why would silicon valley peeps put up with it...money. Big corps are worried that you will implement something you learned while on the job into one of your side hustles. Not defending it, just stating a bit of reasoning.
For the record, I started using Xcode before it was called that and people have said this almost every year since. As I recall there was a big hit to its quality when they converted it to obj-c’s short lived garbage collection, and it felt like it never got back to reliable after that.
Ahhh ProjectBuilder...
Bugfixes won't make shareholders happy while shoving AI down our throats will.
In what way is "AI being shoved down you throat"? Did you think that SwiftUI was shoved down your throat? Did you think that CoreData was shoved down your throat. Perhaps develop a more nuanced critique.
> In what way is "AI being shoved down you throat"?
Ask Microsoft, they have much more experience with that.
> Did you think that SwiftUI was shoved down your throat?
On a scale of 1 to 10, it has been shoved down our throats at level 1 or maybe 2. Thankfully it's optional.
> Did you think that CoreData was shoved down your throat
No.
> Perhaps develop a more nuanced critique.
I believe most people who used Xcode perfectly know what I'm talking about.
> In what way is "AI being shoved down you throat"?
This is a very strange question. It more correct to ask "In what way is AI NOT being shoved down your throat".
> Did you think that SwiftUI was shoved down your throat?
Yes
> Did you think that CoreData was shoved down your throat.
No
Copilot being added to the Xbox app on iOS is the latest ridiculous example I've seen of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.
So you're still in the anger phase?
Well yes but actually no.
For the last ~15 years or so I only use Xcode on the command line sporadically. Prior to that I had to endure the full Xcode experience. I actually liked it between crashes!
What does that mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief
> Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix
Claude code 8 hours later: It's done, mate!
Come on Claude, making it not start isn't the same as fixing the bugs
Idk, I feel like these coding assistant features aren’t that hard to add, but can provide a lot of value to developers. Most or all popular IDEs now support similar features.
I don’t disagree that Apple could use a major focus on bug fixing across their platforms right now though.
Yeah, I'd like to see another OS release like to Snow Leopard (10.6.x) which had as a prime focus simplification and so forth w/o adding many (any?) features.
True that Xcode needs yet another rebuild from scratch. If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work. However adding support for Claude is still a huge win. Could lead the way to making the transition to a sane IDE possible / reasonable. This would require leadership that’s completely absent at the company.
> If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work.
Ever attempted this before at a large company and had success with it? I think I can count four times so far in ~15 years where people attempted to rewrite something medium/large-scale from scratch around me, was a success once, although scope was drastically cut at the end so almost a stretch to call it a success.
You are of course correct. It's not likely to succeed. "Could work" doesn't mean high chance of success. I was trying to imply the opposite. It's just that Xcode has so much baggage that the previous attempts have been very compromised.
In this particular case they just need to release a tool that properly generates compile_commands.json and .clangd from a .xcodeproj.
Boom! emacs is the IDE now. Bonuses all around.
> Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/
It's not even rotting away. It was never completed.
It's XCode 26, and you still can't have the navigator and tabs work like in all other software on all other operation system, also including MacOS.
It's absolutely bonkers, and one of the reason's I decided to use Emacs if possible when working on "XCode projects".
XCode is good for project-reconfiguration and step-by-step debugging, but as an editor it's absolutely unusable.
A full rebuild might be throwing out the baby with the bath water. As someone who’s been using it since it was known as Project Builder, bugs seem mostly concentrated in the XIB/Storyboard editor (formerly known as a Interface Builder), SwiftUI live preview, and SwiftPM package resolve.
In a project with code-only UIKit, only a smattering of SwiftUI for small components, and minimal dependencies, Xcode isn’t too bad of an experience and I’d say comparable to and in some ways better than Android Studio (that localization XML editor, not mention Gradle… ugh).
Refactoring works half the time, Android Studio is much more stable for basic developer tooling.
Because it's developed by JetBrains (with Google contributions), a company whose main business is writing really good IDEs. Apple on contrary is a hardware company that happens to build software. If they had delegated the XCode development to JetBrains, we would have had a great IDE for macOS/iOS development too. AppCode was damn good with zero support from Apple side, and despite the fact that JetBrains always needed to catch-up with Apple's breaking changes.
I've not found Android Studio to be particularly amazing for those kinds of features either. Sometimes they work, sometimes they half-work, and on occasion I've had them do the wrong thing entirely.
A lot of refactoring work across both platforms ends up being manual one way or another.
Release notes: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note...
Surprisingly, this version does not require MacOS 26 (Tahoe).
From my years of iOS development—and based on https://xcodereleases.com typically ships two major Xcode updates each year:
- X.0 (September): bumps Swift, SDK versions, etc. It also tends to have a noticeably longer beta cycle than other releases. - X.3 or X.4 (around March): bumps Swift again and raises the minimum required macOS version.
Other releases in between are usually smaller updates that add features or fix bugs, but they don’t involve major toolchain-level or fundamental changes.
Today’s release doesn’t bump the Swift version, which suggests the core toolchain is essentially the same as Xcode 26.2—so it makes sense that the minimum macOS version wasn’t raised either.
> this version does not require MacOS 26
I think it is required for any AI support. Xcode will run with limited features on earlier OS's.
Agreed - I tried installing Xcode26.3 on my mac running Sequoia and there's no "intelligence" pane in Xcode settings to connect Claude like there is in the docs.
MCP support is the real story here Means you're not locked into Claude or Codex Can plug in whatever agent you want
100% I hope they open more of the tooling to MCP, Xcode Instruments with real MCP support would be huge.
I wonder how much of the recent Apple OS releases were done with "agentic coding".
According to Mark Gurman (Bloomberg Apple beat reporter), Apple “runs on Claude.” https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199?s=61
That makes sense. The latest Sequoia update can't understand it's done updating and shows the "welcome" message every time I boot. I won't upgrade to Tahoe until absolutely necessary. It's like Apple is doing everything in its power to alienate their users.
"custom versions of Claude"
The same thing they’re doing with Gemini, creating custom versions, is likely what they’ve done with Claude and OpenAI models as well. They’re likely evaluating all of them internally with employees all the time.
UI design clearly was done by a chatbot.
spray those menu icons everywhere
When I see Activity Monitor that doesn't show tabs until you nearly go full screen – all I can think is that this shit product was built even before vibecoding was a thing. Truly ahead of its time.
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.
This is true of the CLIs that start with `xcode` but not of the CLIs that start with `swift`. As `swift-format` and `swift-test` have come into their own, they're just as reliable as any other language ecosystem. And the difference is indeed staggering. I wrote this guide last summer on extracting all your app's code into a (nonsensically necessary) Swift package dependency simply so you can test it with Swift Testing https://justin.searls.co/posts/i-made-xcodes-tests-60-times-...
Yes! If you’re lucky enough to be writing a library you are in good shape. Swift did things right.
I have UI and UI tests and xcodebuild is my nemesis.
Anthropic's blog:
> Apple’s Xcode now supports the Claude Agent SDK
https://www.anthropic.com/news/apple-xcode-claude-agent-sdk
"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.
It doesn't interact with sim. You still need XcodeBuildMCP for that. Hopefully future releases implement this functionality.
> You still need XcodeBuildMCP for that.
Or Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/), which should now work great from within Xcode since Apple's using Claude Code SDK.
"Developers get the full power of Claude Code directly in Xcode—including subagents, background tasks, and plugins—all without leaving the IDE." — https://www.anthropic.com/news/apple-xcode-claude-agent-sdk
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.
I tried the three provider types with xcodes current agent integration pane and just trying to use them crashed xcode itself so badly that the ide couldn’t even be launched.
FTA: “In addition to these built-in integrations, Xcode 26.3 makes its capabilities available through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives developers the flexibility to use any compatible agent or tool with Xcode.”
There may be other improvements.
I came here to ask this question. I find the existing agentic coding integraton to be clunky and slow. I've had much better luck with my Xcode projects just using my agentic coding tool of choice in the CLI.
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)
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...
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.
Just in time for AI to go all tits up.
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).
swift --version is showing 6.2.4 for me
Thanks for clarifying. Since I don’t use the LLM features in Xcode, I’m leaning toward skipping this version.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was really not expecting Apple to jump on this bandwagon, but I guess this was inevitable.
Why is it still called Xcode, if they abandoned the name OS X?
don't go creating problems where we don't need solutions.
First time I tried it, claude built all the files in the wrong directory lol. It's working fine now.
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!
Why would you ever want a debugger that isn't integrated with the code editor..? I will never not want to debug code when the current breakpoint and evaluated expressions aren't visible in the code itself.
I mean, look at debugging in IntelliJ: https://resources.jetbrains.com/help/img/idea/2025.3/hotswap...
As opposed to the terminal: https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v16980433...
Does it support API key access or only Claude.ai subscription?
Worth noting that "API key access" vs "subscription" has significant cost implications for heavy users.
Claude.ai Pro is $20/month flat. But if you're doing serious agent-assisted coding (multi-file refactors, iterative debugging loops), you can blow through $50-100/day in API costs.
The math changes depending on usage patterns. Subscription makes sense for interactive coding sessions. API keys make sense if you're batch processing or running agents autonomously overnight.
Both
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...
Can't wait to Tarot or I-Ching based programming.
As MKBHD would say, welcome to 2026, Apple.
The cancer is spreading...
And yet, it still takes 5 minutes for my canvas preview to load, and one in 20 times it crashes the whole app.
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?
I built an entire iOS app without opening Xcode UI even once. Why so many iOS engineers prefer XCode?
Is this bait? XCode has been a mainstay of iOS development ever since iOS was introduced and is a successor to Interface Builder on the Mac.
Why wouldn’t engineers prefer tools they’ve been using (mostly happily) for a decade+?
>Is this bait?
I don't think it's a serious question or the person is very young.
To answer the question. Xcode is the default IDE for iOS development. The default option will always be a practical choice.
JetBrains or Anthropic could get bought by a larger company or dismantled by the government somehow. Should anything happen to Apple (unlikely as that may seem) the entire iOS ecosystem would be gone as well negating any need for a default.
I wish I was young! I have used Xcode in the past. It's just way too slow and anything it does, other IDEs do faster for me.
Some influential iOS devs such as @dimillian and @steipete have moved away from Xcode or even xcodebuild where possible.
Did they add ability to parallelize agents? If not, this remains useless.
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.
I wish they put their energy elsewhere like fix bugs, make faster.
Maybe now they have Claude inside Xcode, the Xcode developers can work faster on fixing all the Xcode issues.
Or is Xcode developed not using Xcode...
(I also 2nd the question about what's really the difference between this and the Xcode 26.2)
Does agents.md allow for automatic discovery of mcp tools (Tools: run ./tool-discovery.sh)
My annoyance is that it sounds like I can't just use Claude Code directly in XCode? I like how Zed does it, it's not perfect, but it works really nicely.
Xcode is using the Claude Agent SDK, which means that you "get the full power of Claude Code directly in Xcode—including subagents, background tasks, and plugins—all without leaving the IDE¹". I assume that means iOS development plug-ins like Axiom² should work as well.
¹ https://www.anthropic.com/news/apple-xcode-claude-agent-sdk ² https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/
How about adding a horizontal scroll to sidebars? No?
"Agentic this", "agentic that"... It's literally just an LLM in a while() loop with some exposed tools.
Fancy while() loops is how I describe them.
[deleted]
> The Claude Agent SDK is a collection of tools that helps developers build powerful agents on top of Claude Code.
https://claude.com/blog/building-agents-with-the-claude-agen...
From September 29, 2025
Thanks Apple, but "agentic coding" was already very possible without Xcode supporting it natively. Always gotta get your OKRs, I guess.
Xcode previews weren’t possible via agents
Goodbye CoPilot plugin, yet another platform Microsoft loses on.
https://github.com/github/CopilotForXcode