Xcode 26 Announced
WWDC 2025: Platforms State of the Union:
Discover the newest advancements on Apple platforms.
Xcode 26 is packed with intelligence features and experiences to help developers make their ideas a reality.
Developers can connect large language models directly into their coding experience to write code, tests, and documentation; iterate on a design; fix errors; and more. Xcode has built-in support for ChatGPT, and developers can use API keys from other providers, or run local models on their Mac with Apple silicon, to choose the model that best suits their needs. Developers can start using ChatGPT in Xcode without needing to create an account, and subscribers can connect their accounts to access more requests.
Coding Tools help developers stay in the flow and be more productive in their tasks. Accessible from anywhere in a developer’s code, Coding Tools provide suggested actions like generating a preview or a playground, or fixing an issue, and can also handle specific prompts for other tasks right inline.
WWDC 2025: What’s new in Xcode 26:
Discover the latest productivity and performance advancements in Xcode 26. Learn how to leverage large language models in your development workflow. Explore editing and debugging enhancements, improved performance and testing tools, and Swift Build - the open-source build system engine used by Xcode.
Xcode 26 beta requires a Mac running macOS Sequoia 15.4 or later.
[…]
Compilation caching has been introduced as an opt-in feature, which speeds-up iterative build/test cycles for Swift and C-family languages. The compilation caching feature caches the results of compilations that were produced for a set of source files inputs and, when it detects that the same set of source files are getting re-compiled, it speeds-up the build by providing the prior compilation results directly from the cache. The workflows that will benefit the most from compilation caching are when switching between branches (which ends up re-compiling the same source files again) or when doing clean builds.
[…]
The
#bundlemacro allows referring to the resource bundle associated with the current Xcode target. You can pass this to any Foundation API expecting aBundle, such as when looking up images or localized strings.[…]
The SwiftUI [Instruments] template has been updated with a next-generation SwiftUI instrument. The new instrument captures the duration of all of the updates SwiftUI performs, making it easy to identify long updates that may be negatively impacting app performance. It also tracks the causes of each update, allowing you to understand why view bodies are running, using the new Cause & Effect Graph.
[…]
Xcode can now generate type-safe Swift symbols for manually-managed strings in String Catalogs. For example, a string in Localizable.xcstrings with key “Landmarks” and value “%(count)lld landmarks” can be accessed via
LocalizedStringResource.landmarks(count: 42). You can enable this via the build setting “Generate String Catalog Symbols”.[…]
Concurrent mutation of nonatomic properties in Objective-C will now sometimes produce more actionable crashes. Synthesized setters will briefly store the sentinel value 0x400000000000bad0 (0xbad0 on 32-bit watchOS) which may be read by another thread accessing the property unsafely. A crash on this sentinel value indicates a thread safety issue with the property it came from.
[…]
Predictive Code Completion in Xcode now supports progressively accepting completions in smaller segments by holding the
^key.[…]
An annotation displaying the #if condition is displayed at the end of a line starting with #endif.
[…]
Starting from Xcode 26, Swift explicit modules will be the default mode for building all Swift targets.
• • •
What Apple says: We’ve expanded our vision for Swift Assist
What Apple means: we screwed up we had to start over
rip all those AI tools that try to hook into Xcode
GPT in Xcode with assistants??!! That was one of my hoped-for things!!!
The ChatGPT integration in Xcode is ok. I guess. Visual Studio has a very similar feature and I haven’t found it helpful for anything once the complexity increases. It’s nifty for summarizing complex code that spans several classes - especially if you need to trace a certain path.
More broadly - I know that the market wants Apple to go after AI. But someone needs to still ship a basic functioning platform and maybe that should really be Apple’s focus and leave the AI to others.
Xcode’s integration with ChatGPT (and other models) this year is incredible, and surprisingly deep. It can pass your project files along, deeplink to specific lines and classes, and scrub back through a change history to see what it’s doing. Syntax errors/deprecation warnings in code will prompt you to pass the reins to ChatGPT in the sidebar to help you fix them up. You can also @-reference specific classes or files in your prompt to have their context included.
Been trying Xcode 26's new Coding Assistant for production the past two days. Here’s a few observations…
It’s a good start. But this is it. Cursor’s Chats are much more capable, including regex searches and command line access. Hence, Xcode can’t commit.
Also Coding Assistant lacks the ability to get context. I know context in Cursor is not well done, but it makes prompting so much easier.
Also dunno what version of ChatGPT Apple is using, it’s horrible. It deletes code instead of fixing. And makes broken changes.
It’s great that we can plug into Claude. But anything beyond trivial requests quickly runs into throttling (“too many tokens per minute“). Never had this with Claude, so it must be fixable.
People are asking me if I’ll go back to Xcode from Cursor. I’m back in it a bit, because it’s easier to work with the new stuff in there for now, but not really. Cursor + Claude Code is just so much better than anything else.
• • •
Looks like you can only use Xcode’s AI features when installing Tahoe on the internal SSD of your Apple silicon Mac.
PSA: even though Apple Intelligence is not currently supported in virtual machines, third-party LLMs in Xcode work just fine if you set them up with an API key.
Don’t waste 5 hours trying to build apps with Xcode 26 in a VM.
It just doesn’t work.
• • •
See the biggest improvement in xcode 26: your incremental builds should hopefully be more reliable, and this lays the ground for remote caching down the line
I seriously think this is the first time in years and years that I could upgrade Xcode and not delete derived data and have it work.
• • •
Xcode looks silly in liquid glass. The design is distinctly non-pro.
Wow Xcode 26… I’m not sure I can handle that UI 😩 Somehow it just feels so distracting with all the floating elements….
Wow. They really ruined Xcode Settings with v26.
This is unusable.
Everything is a million clicks away now.
Don’t follow Apple lead and do not, I beg you, do not make Settings like this.
yes, feels and works as broken as system settings
Why does the new Xcode settings panel look like System Settings? This is a step backward - it was System Settings that needed the redesign!
Oh I do not like this at all
huh
• • •
Oh no - the improved user icons got paired with a really bad Xcode icon :(
I am sorry, Xcode.
Apple’s motivation for this is somewhat addressed in the WWDC icon design session. They recommend to avoid ‘complex illustration styles’ and remove finer details, preferring larger symbolic layers that let the glass material effects provide the sophistication.
• • •
Nice improvement in Xcode 26.
Show’s the #if that matches the #endif
Does anyone know how to get the full names back for open editors in Xcode 26? These series of the same icon are useless to me…
Ian:
I’m sorely missing the old way with editor tabs. All the keyboard shortcuts are missing (“⌥+click a file” to open in another pane, “⌥+⇧+click” to choose where to open the file). And editor grid mode seems to be totally missing? 💔
Is there a way to have Xcode 26 not close the project on Command+W when I close the last opened tab? I keep accidentally closing projects because sometimes I just want to close all tabs 😅
Previously:
- WWDC 2025 Keynote
- Liquid Glass
- Xcode + Claude
- Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe
- Whither Swift Assist?
- ChatGPT Now Integrates Directly With Xcode
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
> I seriously think this is the first time in years and years that I could upgrade Xcode and not delete derived data and have it work.
Lucky you. This is already a requirement for my builds. Anything using 16.4 complains when building in 26 beta 1.
> Wow. They really ruined Xcode Settings with v26.
Agree. Maybe a search box like System Settings has may help. (Or just know that developers don't need this kind of change in Xcode.)
Ugh, economics. Moving settings to SwiftUI is probably necessary to one day be able to have Xcode on platforms like Vision Pro and iPad. But not only does it need a search field, I would argue that it needs to be able to process natural language and offer to change settings for us. But we don’t even get synonym-based search results in System Settings now. So, I despair.
On another note, I wonder whether the SwiftUI code for the new Xcode settings is manually crafted or generated based on some descriptive language that might be a starting point for an Xcode Settings API. One can dream.
