True, but it'd take me a while / forever to figure out how. Reminds me of when I yelled at Gemini until it'd make me a Minecraft Bukkit plugin without installing anything besides the JDK, way easier task but it was still insisting on Gradle for a while.

Heck you can't even compile against many of the Mac APIs without a cert unlocked by a paid developer account.

Running a Mac without an Apple ID feels like an exercise in masochism. I wasn’t aware one could even still it through first run without

Though the primary way of installing Xcode is via MAS (requiring Apple ID login), Xcode can be downloaded from the Apple Developer website without an ADP membership, though you do have to log in to the website with an Apple ID. You don’t have to log into the Mac with an Apple ID though, you can then install and use it on a Mac without an Apple ID (though you will need one inside Xcode to sign apps to get them to run on an iOS device).

What's a not-simple app? I've had Claude generate:

* A Markdown viewer (obviously pretty simple)

* A menu bar Apple TV remote (surprisingly complicated)

* A menu bar and desktop temperature tracker for the silly Tapo temperature trackers I have all over my house (a little complicated because multiple user interfaces, a backing database, scheduling, and multiple local/remote protocol interfaces)

* A graphical CAS calculator frontend to Sage Math with LaTeX math rendering

* An LLMwiki implementation that uses macOS filesystem extensions to reflect a SQLite database into a local filesystem for agents to traverse (basically the new macOS way to do FUSE, fussy enough that the app has to run out of /Applications to work)

* An agent-driven Music.app replacement with AirPlay streaming support managing Apple Music catalogs and tracks

All of these have worked without me ever once touching the xcode UI, except one time to generate Apple Developer certificates, which I then drove exclusively from CLI tools.

These are all pretty modern SwiftUI applications.