Posted by davidbarker 8 hours ago
Why wouldn’t engineers prefer tools they’ve been using (mostly happily) for a decade+?
I don't think it's a serious question or the person is very young.
To answer the question. Xcode is the default IDE for iOS development. The default option will always be a practical choice.
JetBrains or Anthropic could get bought by a larger company or dismantled by the government somehow. Should anything happen to Apple (unlikely as that may seem) the entire iOS ecosystem would be gone as well negating any need for a default.
* text editor with intellisense * build system * visual debugger * CLI coding agent
It’s totally fine if those four things are different. In fact I actually probably prefer them to be different. Having an all-in-one IDE is a complete and total non-goal.
People have historically confused the first three as needing to be a single IDE. This has always been wrong. The number of people who think you can’t debug with Visual Studio if the exe wasn’t built from a .sln is shocking. They’re all independent!
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...
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.
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...
Claude.ai Pro is $20/month flat. But if you're doing serious agent-assisted coding (multi-file refactors, iterative debugging loops), you can blow through $50-100/day in API costs.
The math changes depending on usage patterns. Subscription makes sense for interactive coding sessions. API keys make sense if you're batch processing or running agents autonomously overnight.
