Steve Troughton-SmithSo Xcode just builds entire apps without you now
Xcode's Codex support will happily trundle away for half an hour sticking its tendrils into every little corner of your project, touching and changing every file. It's certainly going to be fun to build new projects with, but ain't no way in hell I want to let that loose on any of my existing apps š
I had Xcode's new agent feature throw together this little UIKit timeline app, without me writing anything myself, all using Codex. I'm not about to pay for Claude, but I'll take this
Believe it or not, this is my first actual brush with agentic coding. I've used ChatGPT in and out of Xcode a ton, but I've never had it just build the entire app for me change by change like you can in Xcode 26.3. I don't think I wrote one line manually in this timeline app
This entire project (1650 lines of code) builds with warnings-as-errors enabled too, and follows all the conventions of my custom Xcode template
Honestly I expected this to be a throwaway project that I would delete when I was done, but it's kind of a fun little app now?
This entire app used 7% of my weekly Codex usage limit. Compare that to a single (awful) slideshow in Keynote using 47% of my monthly Apple Creator Studio usage limit š
You could write a full, shippable app every evening with Xcode's agentic coding features. Two apps a day, even.
ā¦you just know App Review isn't ready for *any of this*. Maybe that's why we've been seeing multi-day waits lately
Document handling (using all the new APIs and styles). It's basically an entire app now. You can see why the development world is in complete upheaval. Very impressed; still wouldn't let it near my actual projects
Super tempted to go through my looong potential projects list and build a prototype of every single one of them with Xcodeās agentic coding, if the results are this good. I spent some time exploring the code it generated for this project and itās so close to what I would have written myself that it might be indistinguishable. If you let it internalize your development style, it seems to do a great job of sticking to it. Gonna see how far I can push it
Leon Breedt@stroughtonsmith as someone else in your mentions said, it works reasonably well if you create a plan first of what you want to build, and when you would consider it finished (persisted to a Markdown file or whatever), and go back and forth with the agent, ask it for proposals, challenge its proposals.
then whenever you want to work on this project, you start with "let's work on item X from PLAN.md", and the LLM doesn't have to start from scratch again, and you've given it a more focused chunk of work to do.
you can also add pre-loaded files like AGENTS.md, and CLAUDE.md (to help you do boring admin stuff by just typing "commit and push" (and have it format, lint, cleanup, create commit messages, whatever, and give it some basic knowledge of the project and its architecture up front).
but for quick prototypes, asking for an app certainly is valid :) when you want to turn it into something real though, and want a lower slop ratio, and something roughly approximating how you would do it yourself, a plan helps.
Radu Ursache@stroughtonsmith this has been possible for at least 6 months but you had to use a terminal š
Yining Karl Li@stroughtonsmith Out of curiosity, how did you ālet it internalize your development styleā? Did you point it at your existing projects and generate an AGENTS.md? Or did you have to manually write some kind of style guide?
Also in the past (lol like three months ago) LLMs seemed to have a lot more trouble with Swift; did you have to handhold it a lot, or does Codex feel like it understands Swift better now? Also, any idea if itās any good at SwiftUI?
@yiningkarlli I haven't tried the AGENTS.md route, but I give it a markdown file before working in each project. I have never had issues with it writing Swift, but I hear its SwiftUI isn't great https://gist.github.com/steventroughtonsmith/ee58b8c7fe6557a073ac792bcb891267
@stroughtonsmith Thatās all really useful to hear; thanks! I have a project idea that Iām excited to try this out on, but Iāve been waffling on whether to try to do it via Catalyst or via SwiftUI.
@yiningkarlli ymmv but I think it's much better at writing UIKit code than SwiftUI, probably because there's a much greater body of high quality work it can draw from
@stroughtonsmith Yeah that makes sense to me. Haha I guess thereās also an element of nobody ever really knows how SwiftUI is going to choose to lay out stuff too, at least on macOS. š
Tawfiq@stroughtonsmith This is awesome, had been thinking about drawing something similar but hadn't considered making an app for it! Would you consider open-sourcing it?
Brian Gerfortšŗš¦
@stroughtonsmith Very impressive! I just wish I didnāt have to pay anyone (anything?) to do it for me. Gimme a local agent! š And Iām sure it doesnāt write ObjC?
@2ndNatureDev I canāt see why it wouldnt? Iāve used ChatGPT extensively with ObjC
@stroughtonsmith Nice! (Never know what Apple would do to nudge us towards Swift š)
I foresee a future where custom made apps are no longer just for companies with big budgets.
I foresee a future where custom made apps are no longer just for companies with big budgets.
caseyneiba š¦£@stroughtonsmith There already is a ChatGPT integration (non agentic) in the stable Xcode version. I tried to create a watch app. Even after correcting some hallucinations (inexistant attributes), the AI added them again in the file even if I was asking for a change in ANOTHER part of the file ššš
@caseyneiba I would say this new integration has vastly different results to the previous ChatGPT feature
@stroughtonsmith Does it still require a paid subscription to ChatGPT or is it a wrapper on Apple side so it becomes free ?
@caseyneiba in theory yes, but I think Codex is free right now to free users
Michael@stroughtonsmith why not let it near your actual products? Doesnāt hurt to try, you can still take a look at the changes before committing anything.
@mi a lot has happened in 7 days!
Kyle Hughes
Kyle Hughes (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image 2025 was, indeed, the dawn of dropshipping apps, as the prophecy foretold.
Gui Rambo@stroughtonsmith I need to learn whatever prompting technique gets you a āshippable appā, because my results are always slop š Or maybe my definition of āshippableā is just too strict.
@_inside maybe I'm just good at this š
Julian Torres@_inside @stroughtonsmith You didnāt ask me of course, but I find going tthrough a āplanningā phase without having the agent write any code, refining the āplanā and then telling it to execute the āplanā only when I think the plan is āgood enoughā gets you really far
Paul Haddad 
@stroughtonsmith I'm sure the masses are clamoring for more apps.
Thomas Brand@stroughtonsmith @paul Apple Vision Pro isn't developing itself.
max oakland@Eggfreckles Neither are developers
@paul just another chapter in Appleās long ādevaluing appsā saga
Keir@stroughtonsmith @paul well they basically created the category so if anyone's gonna wreck it, it might as well be them š
poswald@stroughtonsmith @paul It would be fine for Apple to move into a āpost-appsā age... I think it's probably not the right metaphor for all time the same way music went from disc to purchased downloads to subscriptions. The problem is that they don't have a compelling alternative lined up for developers to adopt. They fumbled the SaaS model, and now will probably miss whatever is coming next.
Awax@stroughtonsmith once agents remove writing code as a bottleneck, the next bottleneck is PR review/knowledge sharing
We donāt review code syntax, we review the associated spec, the correspond tests (ie āwhat is this supposed to do and how is it proving it is actually done today and tomorrowā) and the overall pattern/shape of the code for consistency with the rest of the app (ie ācan I still find my way around that code?ā)
Because we are still the ones on-call to be woken up at 2am if something is acting wonky and āI dunno, Claude generated thisā is not an acceptable answer
@stroughtonsmith from an Software Engineer point-of-view, this is as if our team just got bigger with way more code outputed faster. However this is basically the same job weāve been already doing, minus the code writing part. Since there is typically more than one engineer per team, this is just a scaling issue.
But for Product Management, especially Product Owner/Business Analyst, where there is usually just one or two per team, this is a scaling they are not prepared to cope with. They become the main bottleneck.
Mike Cane@stroughtonsmith MOAR AI SLOP!
@stroughtonsmith forget coding, Apple needs to focus on releasing an agent that deals with the App Store submission and approval process.
Todd Sizemore@stroughtonsmith I wonder what that might mean about the limits of various llm tools. Does that mean Apple is being stingy or could they be charging what it costs to generate? Or is Codex being generous but setting limits that are unsustainable for that price?
AnimeAndVisial@stroughtonsmith I spend way too much time perfecting my keynote slide and I wonāt have it any other way. Iām kinda annoyed I canāt get rid of *all* Apple Creator Studio toolbar icons on iPadOS.
@AnimeAndVisial can't you? Most of them are in the editable toolbar region, no?
@stroughtonsmith Only the middle of the toolbar can be edited on iPadOS. The object hub library thing canāt be hidden unfortunately
Rich Aesthetic@AnimeAndVisial The object hub isn't solely paid content. The shapes and the pen tool (to make your own shapes) are there.
Jay@stroughtonsmith it probably helps they are running a 2x increase on limits right now.
John Davis@stroughtonsmith does Xcode give hard numbers for these percents? Could the free allotment change out from under users?
@its_john_davis thatās my Codex dashboard on the site
@stroughtonsmith Thatās actually insane. They made their apps worse for this??
Rob@stroughtonsmith Have you written about your custom Xcode template? That would be really interesting as it relates to this.
