Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode

I just installed it—definitely not a toy.

Compared to stock Claude Code, this version of Claude knows a lot more about SwiftUI and related technologies. The following is output from Claude in Xcode on an empty project. Claude Code gives a generic response when it looked at the same project:

    What I Can Help You With

    • SwiftUI Development: Layout, state management, animations, etc.
    • iOS/macOS App Architecture: MVVM, data flow, navigation
    • Apple Frameworks: Core Data, CloudKit, MapKit, etc.
    • Testing: Both traditional XCTest and the new Swift Testing framework
    • Performance & Best Practices: Swift concurrency, memory management

    Example of What We Could Do Right Now

    Looking at your current ContentView.swift􀰓, I could help you:
    • Transform this basic "Hello World" into a recovery tracking interface
    • Add navigation, data models, or user interface components
    • Implement proper architecture patterns for your Recovery Tracker app

Isn’t that easy to add with some rules and guidelines documents? I usually ask Claude code to research modern best practices for SwiftUI apps and to summarize the learnings in a rules file that will be part of the SwiftUI project.

If a bunch of markdown files forced into the context is “knowing”, then yes. They are usually located at /Applications/Xcode-beta.app/Contents/PlugIns/IDEIntelligenceChat.framework/Versions/A/Resources/AdditionalDocumentation

You are free to point Claude Code to that folder, or make a slash command that loads their contents. Or, start CC with -p where the prompt is the content of all those files.

Claude Code integration in Xcode would be very cool indeed, but I might still stick with VSCode for pure coding.

Yes and no. Proper Agentic coding tools like Claude Code are a bit more than just a bunch of markdown rulesets.

For example: it uses Haiku as a model to run tools and most likely has automatic translations for when the model signals it wants to search or find something -> either use the built-in search or run find/fd/grep/rg

All that _can_ be done by prompting, but - as always with LLMS - prompts are more like suggestions.

I'm as crazy about AI as the next dev, but that has to be the weakest example of AI capability that I have ever seen.

> Claude Code integration in Xcode would be very cool indeed, but I might still stick with VSCode for pure coding.

I'm sticking with VSCode too, but it's a bit silly to suggest that anyone is using XCode because it's their preferred IDE. It's just the one that's necessary for any non-trivial Apple platform development.

Adding a code generator isn't a marketing ploy to get people to switch editors, it's just a small concession to the many hapless souls stuck dealing with Apple on the professional side, or masochistically building mac SwiftUI apps just to remind themselves what pain feels like.

I mean you can stay in VSCode for most activities if you hate Xcode that much (I can relate btw). Plugins like Sweetpad make this possible. My approach now is to develop all logic in small Swift packages and run swift test in VSCode (or Claude Code), so I only absolutely need Xcode for debugging and building releases. Every once in a while I try SwiftUI previews, but those are usually broken anyways.

People are just excited to see Apple finally integrate something useful. But it’s not 1/100th as useful as agentic tools (CC, Codex) which have access to the exact same markdown files as the Apple one. There’s nothing else special about Apple’s offering, and it has no agentic capability. It is a waste of time to use it.

I actually continue to use Xcode (in vim mode now that they have that) purely because of the way tabs work… in Vim and Xcode I’m able to have the same file open across multiple tabs and window-tabs, allowing me to arrange sets of files for particular tasks. But in VS Code it sends me to another window when I want to view a file next to another one, just because it’s already open elsewhere. I can’t stand this behavior as it slows me down and breaks my ability to see the files I want to see next to each other without many extra steps to rearrange things over and over. A ticket requesting this behavior change has been open for years with no progress.

No, this isn't a bunch of markdown files, has been in the works since at least May and has been dogfooded inside Apple [1]: "Apple Partners With Anthropic for Claude-Powered AI Coding Platform"

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/02/apple-anthropic-ai-codi...

If it is severely less capable - and not even any cheaper to use - then it’s a toy! A penny farthing can get you somewhere just as a car can but only one is perhaps of professional utility even if the other used to be at one point too

What is special about it besides the IDE integration? It is a bunch of markdown files with a search tool. It has no agentic capability so it is far behind state of the art dev tooling. Apple devs internally use Claude Code.

That's an interesting auper apecific detail that I think I've encountered once or twice. I'm reminded of one niche reason I also chose XCode for non-apple stuff, which was to print code on paper. I don't remember why I struggled to do it in VSCode at the time, but XCode was the solution.

Ya I was considering a similar workflow last time I was steeped in SwiftUI. I don't dislike it that much actually, maybe just how slow the compile and error alerting is/was last time. I mainly found mac SwiftUI performance to be lacking, along with the transparency and documentation of the api. Swift itself is fine, and I give a xcode a lot of credit for somehow functioning as well as it does with so much accumulated functionality/complexity/bloat.

SwiftUI previews were... manageable but not great.

I typically have 5-6+ panes open per window tab representing an area of work. In Xcode I can also make new window tabs that inherit the same set of tabs/splits/panes allowing me to "fork" and tweak a view of files. I use these features continuously throughout the day and hit jarring blocks trying to work this way every session in VS Code which makes it impossible to have more than one arrangement at once. I've been using this workflow for 15+ years in Vim before Xcode.