Archive for August 28, 2025

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Xcode 26 Beta 7

Apple (downloads, releases, MacRumors, Hacker News):

Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4.

When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users can now start a new conversation with either GPT-4.1 or GPT-5, with GPT-5 set as the default.

ChatGPT in Xcode provides two model choices. “GPT-5” is optimized for quick, high-quality results, and should work well for most coding tasks. For difficult tasks, choose “GPT-5 (Reasoning)”, which spends more time thinking before responding, and can provide more accurate results for complex coding tasks.

Previously:

Update (2025-09-02): Steven Woolgar:

I don’t often have the use the Settings window in Xcode, but when I do I cry because of how it is now just as awful as the system settings app.

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

Xcode beta 7 has signed in to Claud with the claude account, that is not API key. is this the exclusive gateway for Apple? I don’t see api for that.

Marcin Krzyzanowski:

Xcode 26 release is imminent. in the meantime, it fails to compile Metal

wizard (via Fatbobman):

The animations and design of Xcode have never been better, a testament to Apple’s polish. Yet, interacting with the new intelligence features felt… different. This wasn’t just a tool; it felt like a ghostly Apple spirit nudging every decision.

[…]

Xcode 26’s intelligence features are powered by a structured planner-executor agent designed for deep integration within the Apple development ecosystem. Analysis of its internal prompts and service reflections reveals a system that prioritizes deterministic behavior, adherence to Apple’s technology stack, and carefully managed context.

Rudrank Riyam:

Xcode AI uses 2 planner prompts with one for GPT 5. I cannot invoke search_additional_documentation in GPT 5 but it is so easy in Sonnet 4 🤔

Rudrank Riyam:

There are so many prompts to go through. It gives a good idea on how Xcode AI works

Rudrank Riyam:

Xcode still goes 100% CPU and crashes when the context window goes like 30-40K+ tokens in beta 7.

I mentioned this on 9th June when it crashed my MacBook twice just for pasting a 30K token file.

Joachim Kurz:

Today’s quality of development for Apple platforms report:

Since Xcode 15 (?) colors and images in assets catalogs are generated as extensions on (UI/NS)Color, (UI/NS)Color and friends, so you don‘t have to load them by string name and fail at runtime but het a compiler error instead. Great!

But:

  • the advertised build setting for enabling disabling the setting doesn‘t do anything. Instead you have to explicitly turn ok the extension generation in the asset catalogs file inspector (not the individual asset’s attributes inspector)
  • this way also works in Swift packages and since some time Swift packages can contain resources and SwiftPM has an asset catalog compiler. Nice!
  • But the generated extensions are all internal and there is no way to make them public. So they get generated and all, but you can‘t use them from outside the package and instead have to explicitly add the extension as a public property manually again. 🤦🏻‍♂️

The Steve Ballmer Interview

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal:

We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve listened to our Microsoft episodes and had some thoughts to share — and boy, did he deliver. Steve takes us point-by-point through the original IBM DOS deal that started everything, how he built Microsoft’s enterprise business from scratch, and offers his candid reflections on missing mobile and search. We also cover the story behind “developers, developers, developers”, the complexities of his relationship with Bill Gates (including a year where they didn’t speak), and why he ultimately decided to step down as CEO.

I found this really interesting. He has a few comments about Apple:

You might create something that goes nowhere. You might create what’s essentially a feature for somebody else’s business and get acquired. You might. I call that zero tricks. Then you get a one-trick pony. One-trick ponies are amazing. People should be in awe of one-trick ponies.

[…]

Apple’s two-tricks. […] Mac and mobile, if you want to say it’s high power consumption and low power consumption.

I consider [services] just part of the trick. […] It’s like us adding things to Office and redoing the EA. […] It’s an additional monetization model, but it’s not a new locomotive. A locomotive is the business that can pull the cabooses, and the locomotive remains the phone. The services business go away pretty quick if the phone volume fell apart. It’s additional, very important… […] I think Mac versus everything iOS is also uncorrelated.

Dan Luu:

There’s a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I’ve seen and it’s a commonly expressed belief “in real life” as well. While I don’t have anything negative to say about Nadella’s leadership in this post, this narrative underrates Ballmer’s role in Microsoft’s success. Not only did Microsoft’s financials, revenue and profit, look great under Ballmer, Microsoft under Ballmer made deep, long-term bets that set up Microsoft for success in the decades after his reign. At the time, the bets were widely panned, indicating that they weren’t necessarily obvious, but we can see in retrospect that the company made very strong bets despite the criticism at the time.

In addition to overseeing deep investments in areas that people would later credit Nadella for, Ballmer set Nadella up for success by clearing out political barriers for any successor. Much like Gary Bernhardt’s talk, which was panned because he made the problem statement and solution so obvious that people didn’t realize they’d learned something non-trivial, Ballmer set up Microsoft for future success so effectively that it’s easy to criticize him for being a bum because his successor is so successful.

Brad Silverberg:

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Windows 95.

Previously:

Update (2025-09-02): See also: Hacker News.

SwiftUI WebView

Sarah Reichelt:

In the WWDC video, they demonstrated how to track the navigation events. The code in the video does not work - it doesn’t even compile. But after some trial and error, I worked out how to track these events.

[…]

If you want your WebView to load custom pages, create a custom scheme. In my Man Reader app, I use a custom scheme to load HTML versions of man pages, so I decided to try something similar here.

[…]

In macOS Tahoe 26 beta 7 and Xcode 26 beta 6, this external navigation prints what appears to be a crash log in the console, but the app does not crash.

[…]

I have included the replaceDisabled(true) modifier but it doesn’t work in a WebView. The modifier doesn’t stop the replace interface from appearing, but replacing doesn’t actually work[…]

[…]

At first, I assumed that page.load() required a URL or a URLRequest, but then I realized that I could also ask it to load a WebPage.BackForwardList.Item directly. […] I had a problem with the back and forward menus which made me think that the history was not updating correctly. After temporarily re-purposing the refresh button to list the history items, I worked out that history list was correct but the menus were not being updated when the list changed.

Previously:

What Xcode 26’s AI Chat Integration Is Missing

Cihat Gündüz:

I ended up running Claude Code in Cursor’s terminal instead – getting Cursor’s editor awareness with Claude Code’s superior tools like web search, planning mode, and the generous 5-hour usage window.

[…]

Request queuing was the first limitation I noticed in Xcode right away. When I’m developing, thoughts and questions come fast. Having to wait for each response breaks my rhythm completely.

[…]

Without automatic context loading, all the work I’ve done on context engineering – teaching the AI my coding standards, architectural patterns, error handling approaches, and more – simply isn’t possible in Xcode. I have to repeatedly explain my guidelines in every conversation.

[…]

The AI can’t validate its own code changes by running builds or even access build output when I run them. It can’t even read console logs when I explicitly ask it to.

[…]

Claude Code can search my git history, bring back working code from previous commits, and create properly formatted commits by analyzing the actual changes and finding a good message that follows my commit guidelines. It can even help update documentation by comparing what changed since the last version.

Running on the server, Xcode’s AI can’t search the local documentation files, and it doesn’t know about the online Swift evolution proposals, either.

Previously:

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