Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode

Posted by speckx 1 day ago

Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode(scottwillsey.com)

536 points | 229 commentspage 4

isodev 1 day ago|

In addition to the challenged Xcode, just using Swift seems to require a lot more tokens for both coding and dealing with build/platform quirks. Probably not super significant on indie scale but for anything more robust, it builds up quickly.

React Native and Flutter seem to be much more predictable for the bots (and more fun for humans, since they have actual hot reload).

waynecochran 1 day ago||

The main iPhone app I maintain for work is 100% claude edited now ... I don't touch the code anymore ... I do occasionally look at it. It does a way better job than I could. I do have Xcode open as claude does its thing ... and I occasionally sign and deploy with Xcode. No coding though.

zitterbewegung 1 day ago||

Xcode 27 which is in beta ships a much better codex integration. There are problems in Xcode that are frustrating . Also, git integrations are a nice touch that allow you to force push too. Would be interesting to find out how well this works in a team based setting.

pjmlp 23 hours ago||

The pain people go through not to use XCode, for me it does the job.

eschaton 22 hours ago|

It’s incredible to me the lengths these people will go to just to avoid using the standard tools.

andrekandre 10 hours ago||

the path of most resistance... sometimes i wonder if apple's insistence on a mac + paid membership is a kind of intentional filter, like they want someone who's devoted enough to invest 100 bucks + a mac etc

pmarreck 17 hours ago||

The first Mac app I ever built, which was at least 6 months ago using only AI, was purely LLM without XCode at all.

tomaskafka 1 day ago||

I find it hard to believe xcodegen is in a state where it would reliably generate xcodeproj for all edge states (widgets, watchos app, notification extensions …) - it certainly wasn’t when I last tried it for Weathergraph few years ago.

That said, it might be well enough for simpler apps.

tptacek 1 day ago|

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.

myHNAccount123 1 day ago||

Xcode 27 beta 3 has been the most stable release I've ever used. The type checking improvements were understated so I gotta laugh at this xcode avoidance.

Areas they could improve - what ever the heck is going on in their diffing ui for source control.

qpx2022 1 day ago||

I use this script to build and notarize macOS apps, you might find it useful as well: https://github.com/muquit/NotarizeMacApp

mctwo 1 day ago||

I don't see the point of this, if you use Claude or whatever frontier LLM you like, you need Xcode only to start emulators / install app on phones or to upload a binary.

datadrivenangel 1 day ago|

I've built a few small MacOS dock widgets now by just telling Claude/OpenCode to build them. Works well enough if you're very explicit.

The most useful one is a little weather sparkline to show local temperature forecasts. Useful every day.

esafak 1 day ago|

What framework was it written in, and does it trigger a scary warning from the OS when you try to install it?

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