https://claude.com/blog/building-agents-with-the-claude-agen...
From September 29, 2025
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...
Surprisingly, this version does not require MacOS 26 (Tahoe).
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).
- 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.
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
¹ https://www.anthropic.com/news/apple-xcode-claude-agent-sdk ² https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/
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.
To set file association stuff more easily than with the Finder GUI, you can run (with https://github.com/moretension/duti):
duti -s com.apple.textedit public.${whatever} all
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...
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.
But the best part is what it DOESN'T install when you think you've updated. You get on a plane and settle in for some work, only to be prompted to download and install a bunch of required crap you weren't told about. OH WELL, says Apple, your time is FREE!
RemedyBG: https://remedybg.itch.io/remedybg
RadDbg: https://x.com/rfleury/status/1747756219404779845?s=46
I mostly edit code in VSCode. I mostly debug code in VisualStudio. They don’t have to be the same.
I do concede that one tool to rule them all is appealing. But ultimately I work with many different languages so it’s kind of a multi-tool world no matter how you slice it.
Zed's ACP seems to be a good solution to this - when using it, claude code has access to the IDE's diagnostics and tools, just like the human operator. https://zed.dev/acp
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/giving-agent...
