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 😂
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 👀
You could write a full, shippable app every evening with Xcode's agentic coding features. Two apps a day, even.
…you just know App Review isn't ready for *any of this*. Maybe that's why we've been seeing multi-day waits lately
Awax@stroughtonsmith once agents remove writing code as a bottleneck, the next bottleneck is PR review/knowledge sharing
We don’t review code syntax, we review the associated spec, the correspond tests (ie “what is this supposed to do and how is it proving it is actually done today and tomorrow”) and the overall pattern/shape of the code for consistency with the rest of the app (ie “can I still find my way around that code?”)
Because we are still the ones on-call to be woken up at 2am if something is acting wonky and “I dunno, Claude generated this” 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 we’ve 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.