Paul Haddad 
ObjC is so hard to read!!! Meanwhile…
I'm stuck in Swift land for at least the next week, so expect a lot of moaning and groaning. There's for sure some parts that I like about it, if they had a version with maybe 1/4 of the features (i.e. needless complexity) I might actually say I'd enjoy using it.
Yesterday's Swift week highlight was spending at least an hour trying to find the right annotations to tell the compiler/concurrency stuff what a couple methods do threading wise. Turns out I had the right combo from the get go but it’s broken in both Xcode 26.2/4 and fixed in the .5 beta. Couldn't tell in older Xcodes because Apple blocks old Xcodes from running in current OSes for "reasons”.
Swift's concurrency approach is emblematic of its complete lack of pragmatism. Runtime sees hey I think this code is running in the wrong thread (or context if you must) what do I do? Warn and ignore, because it's probably OK 99% of the time, nope. Warn and correct, because you have enough info to infer what is probably needed, nope. How about crash 100% of the time, yep, that's the one.
Generate Fix. “I’m removing the code.” Thanks AI!
Just to prove that I don't always just complain, the Expand Macro feature of Xcode/Swift is pretty cool.
I spent a good part of this week fighting with Shortcuts. Shortcuts are conceptually simple, take a thing, give a thing. I don't know if I'm missing something fundamental (that's also not clearly documented anywhere) but what a freaking nightmare when "thing" isn't just a simple String/AttributedString. There's a Transferable protocol that's supposed to magically convert between types but the Shortcuts app doesn't seem to call it unless the user does extra stuff when passing variables around.
After fighting with it for literal days I ended up setting it to just take an AttributedString and return a “UnionValue" thing that is like documented in one web page and a WWDC link, both with incorrect explanation of how it should be used.
It still doesn't work like I think it should but it works mostly OK and at this point I give up working on a feature 1% of users will ever touch.
If I was a better developer, I'd create a test project and get it ready for talking to someone at WWDC (remotely) but I'm more ready to just wipe this from memory and forget it even exists. Rant fin.
Casey Liss@paul The Shortcuts/App Intents API is so fucking inscrutable. And the documentation is too disjoint to fix that problem.
And/or I’m a dunce.
@caseyliss LLM helped a lot with that, but even it was totally lost a lot of times.
Brian Mueller@paul @caseyliss imagine having to add support for it before LLMs were a thing :\
@brianmueller I don't really consider myself LLM dependent, but freely admit I don't think I would've gotten anything done without one to boiler plate stuff for me and explaining how the hell the Swift bits work. Huge reason I didn't consider doing it until now.
@paul yep it’s very useful for stuff like this, I hope they can work with the summer beta APIs, I always have the most trouble then
@brianmueller I always try to wait a few months to years...
Timo Hetzel@paul @brianmueller I got Codex to write an app that lets Final Cut talk to it via AppleEvents and handshake an export. Tried years ago manually and had to give up.
My very basic intents would never have shipped were it not for Claude Code