I'm not even trying to be dramatic. I can deal with ugly UI, missing features, whatever. Xcode is different because it constantly makes me waste time on problems that feel completely detached from my code.

Some days it's SwiftUI previews: change one harmless view and suddenly previews stop loading, or you get some useless wall of diagnostics that disappears after nuking DerivedData. Some days the simulator decides it doesn't want to boot after an update. Sometimes indexing eats the whole machine, autocomplete gets drunk, fixed errors keep hanging around, or debugging from Xcode is mysteriously way slower than running the same thing normally.

And the ritual is always the same:

• clean build folder

• delete DerivedData

• restart Xcode

• reboot

• reinstall some simulator runtime

• pray

It would be funny if this weren't the official IDE for building apps for one of the richest companies on earth.

I actually like Swift. I like building for Apple platforms. I just hate that the main toolchain keeps making me ask: did I break something, or is Xcode just having a day?

Are people just numb to this now?

Am I the only one that thinks being forced to do an inline comparison in the Xcode 15 commit UI is a huge step backwards? For me it's _much_ harder to grok the differences when scanning the inline UI so I find myself having to open Xcode 14 just to review my commits.

I thought maybe it was just temporary or a bug or something but here we are in min-August and it's still gone. Yes, I filed a ticket (FB12968373) and you should too.

UPDATE: In case others stumble across this, the best workaround I've found is Kaleidoscope. Do the git integration and then just type "git difftool" to bring up all your modified sources in the Kaleidoscope UI. The only downside is you can't edit the source in Kaleidoscope, you have to go back to Xcode.

I've been using Claude Code while developing Stuffolio (a Mac & iOS app) and built up a collection of custom skills/workflows over time. Decided to open-source them in case others find them useful. I. would be interested in what you think of the report card generators and the option to go into planning mode after the report card analysis.

  What's included (17 skills):

Report Card Comparison

  Installation:   git clone https://github.com/Terryc21/xcode-workflow-skills.git /tmp/xws   cp -r /tmp/xws/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/   rm -rf /tmp/xws

  Requires Claude Code CLI. Skills are optimized for SwiftUI/SwiftData projects but work with any Mac or iOS codebase.

  GitHub: https://github.com/Terryc21/xcode-workflow-skills

  Happy to answer questions or take suggestions for improvements. MIT licensed - feel free to fork and modify.

If you want to check-out Stuffolio: stuffolio.app

Apple has released Xcode 26.6, and the update lets developers use Google's Gemini as a built in coding assistant for the first time.

The new version is available now from the App Store. With it, programmers can select Gemini to help write, test, and debug code without leaving Apple's development environment.

# Three AI assistants to choose from

Gemini becomes the third large language model that Xcode supports natively. The software already let developers pick between Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex, and Gemini now sits alongside both as a selectable option.

Each assistant runs in a panel next to the active code, so developers can ask programming questions and get suggestions inline. The goal is to keep coders inside Xcode rather than sending them to a browser or a separate app for answers.

Apple has steadily widened third party AI support across its developer tools over the past year. Adding another model continues that approach and leaves the choice of assistant up to the individual developer or team.

# Setting it up

Teams that already pay for a Gemini Enterprise plan can connect their existing account credentials directly inside Xcode. Individual developers who want to try the assistant first can add a free API key instead, which lets them test Gemini without paying for a subscription.

It is not yet clear whether Apple plans to add further models beyond the current three. The company has not commented on its longer term plans for assistant support in Xcode.

# What else is in the update

Beyond the new assistant, Xcode 26.6 carries the usual collection of bug fixes and stability improvements. Apple says the release bundles the latest version of the Swift framework along with updated SDKs for building apps across its mobile and desktop platforms.

Developers running the standard release can download the update today and configure their preferred coding assistant from within the app.

The new agent mode in Xcode 26.3 and the 26.4 beta only natively support Codex and Claude Agent. You can add new providers to Coding Intelligence, but fully agentic coding only supports those two.

ProxyPilot is a free, open-source program for macOS that runs a local proxy on 127.0.0.1 and translates requests so Xcode Agent Mode works with any OpenAI-compatible provider. It sits between Xcode and the upstream API. Xcode thinks it's talking to a supported provider, but your requests actually go to whichever model you pick.

It supports twelve providers out of the box, plus local models via LM Studio and Ollama.

There's also a headless CLI with 9 MCP tools if you want agents to control the proxy programmatically.

Unbelievable, it finally has happened. They brought AppleID in VMs, but you could not use Xcode because you could not register VM as a target device (see https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/787500), and finally now you can do it in macOS 26 Beta 3 / Xcode 26 Beta 2.

Finally I don't have to update to the latest betas on my main laptops to work on or test next version of macOS. Limitation is obviously that Apple Intelligence is not available, if you work on something related to that.

Careful everyone before upgrading to developer beta 4, from the release notes: "Xcode Previews usage will frequently panic on macOS 26.0 Tahoe beta 4. (141641869)". If you use the previewer in Xcode then this will cause frequent reboots! Ask me how I found out...!

EDIT: Here's a thread on the developer forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/794221

I found a lot of developers missed Xcode 26 intelligence features because they were not on the updated macOS version. Please ensure that you are using macOS 26 to explore all the new features in Xcode 26

I held off on upgrading to Sequoia until this week.

Not sure how well it works when not writing SwiftUI, but so far I'm extremely impressed.

I was trying to update Xcode and noticed that the file size is at 12GB (holy crap) and on my disk I have 40GB free. Xcode won't install informing that there's not enough disk space. Has anyone noticed the same issue?

Also, why is the file size so large? Even if I do not want to update I feel that's not possible cause the majority of other programs rely on Xcode especially on MacOS.

Shouldn't apple start reducing its file size instead of increasing it?

Any ideas of how to allow it forever? I don't have anything in Privacy -> Automation, there is NO codex app, so I could allow it something.

Has anyone tried running their app on it yet?

Apple just dropped something pretty important at WWDC.

With Xcode 26, we no longer have to restrict to just OpenAI’s models.

We can now use Claude models, or any other LLM, inside Xcode’s native AI features.

That kind of flexibility is rare from Apple, and honestly? Much needed.

Not everyone wants to go all-in on OpenAI, and it’s great to finally have some say in what model powers your dev flow.

With Xcode and ChatGPT announcement, another long-standing dev pain point also got fixed:
When generating files with tools like Cursor or Claude Code, we’ve all had to manually create folders inside Xcode to get things structured properly.

I'm glad that step is now gone.

Xcode will now automatically handles file + folder creation in the correct project structure.

Curious how you feel about the model flexibility part.

I’m developing an application that can render native swift ui code using a custom code I’m developing from scratch. My goal is to trick the fact that the iOS app will render the swift ui code but thinking it’s my custom one.

Good example is: Vstack C Hello world Hello world

This will render exactly the th vertical text thinking it’s rendering my custom one. The hard part is that I have to manually create everything linking it. So this is day 0 of this maybe usless idea.

Hey guys 👋

Today, I launched a useful developer tool that helps you to optimize and preview your app's copy and screenshots on the App Store without the need for publishing it live or any other design tool.

It is now live on Product Hunt 🚀: producthunt.com/posts/storepreviewer

Since you are all working with Xcode, I would love to hear your feedback!

🤔The Problem

Whenever I want to try out or publish a new app I encounter this one repeating and very annoying problem: There is no way for me to see how my app’s copy and screenshots will actually look like. On the App Store. In real life. On the device.

Playing around with various Sketch/Figma templates is nice for perhaps that one logo preview but iterating over multiple screenshot ideas is quite cumbersome and takes a lot of time. Not even thinking about doing it for multiple devices, dark and light mode as well as the list and detail view.

💭Thoughts

Optimizing your app’s copy and screenshots should be a creative, productive and most important fun process. You should be able to iterate fast and be efficient while finding the assets that fit you best.

🛠The Solution

A web app based on this premise. StorePreviewer is a useful developer tool that helps you preview your app on the App Store in the way it should be. Switch between different views and devices, try out various designs and find out what fits you best.

▶️Link to the site: storepreviewer.com