@mattiem obfuscation is pretty much pointless from a security standpoint, and most code in most software is not that special or proprietary anyway, so I don’t see a reason to adopt it.

@finnvoorhees I’ve been using LLMs to help with reverse engineering for a while and they’re quite good at it, even when working with very low-level components such as the iOS kernel and TXM/SPTM

📊 Poll time!

Vibe coding or agentic engineering, I am curious what the Apple developer community is doing with LLM-assisted programming, now that Xcode has integrated it.

I know the wider Mastodon community has strong opinions on this stuff, but do you personally intend to use these tools? Has your opinion changed either way over the past year?

(You can pick multiple options)

@cabel @stroughtonsmith @marcedwards @_inside https://github.com/nathangathright/recomposer Here's a stab at that idea that worked for some of the first party apps, like Podcasts and App Store https://github.com/nathangathright/recomposer

@a_grebenyuk yeah, even in UIKit sometimes I have to be very explicit about which architecture or API to use, otherwise the results are not good at all. I’ve had to help the agent a lot with debugging more complicated things, so I can’t imagine someone without significant programming experience and knowledge of the platform and APIs being able to get shippable code out of it at this time.

@mitt_rafael A bunch, but my most recent experiences have been with the built-in Claude agent in Xcode 26.3

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/116029301292604115

All of my attempts at having LLMs create SwiftUI apps ended up in frustration, but I've been playing around with a UIKit app for a couple of days now and getting very interesting results 👀

I think the syntax of SwiftUI itself is particularly confusing for LLMs. I've seen many models mess up things such as opening and closing braces when writing complex SwiftUI code. They also tend to bake too much business logic in view code instead of modularizing things, which doesn't happen when doing UIKit.

@andy really? Interesting! It rarely does that for me. Claude does it all the time and it drives me crazy 😂

Claude is a lot better at it than Codex, but in this example I was using Claude (as you can probably tell by the annoying “You're absolutely right" response)

I’ve spent several hours today playing around with agents in Xcode 26.3. There are lots of things I like with the integration, but by far the most frustrating aspect is that the agents will sometimes just "forget" that they're running inside Xcode and start trying to run terminal commands for things that they can do with the Xcode integration, even simple things such as reading content from files. The good thing is that telling them to use Xcode instead usually works.

@tonyarnold That's exactly what I'm doing and it's working just fine

I've been pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to make Xcode compile Swift packages for arm64e (Enhanced Security mode). Turns out there's a "secret” plist file you have to add to your xcodeproj to make it happen. Thanks a lot to @maxgoedjen for helping me out with this. Documented by Apple in the following link (plutil commands): https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit/creating-browser-extensions-in-xcode

@stroughtonsmith I need to learn whatever prompting technique gets you a “shippable app”, because my results are always slop 😂 Or maybe my definition of “shippable” is just too strict.

@belovedmelody @stroughtonsmith the new agentic integration in Xcode can search Apple's documentation, so in theory it should be able to use any public API in the current SDK

@bryce I admire your patience for writing most of that in Swift 😆👏🏻

Apple's developer tools can be surprisingly complex under the hood, but this single implementation is still extra mind-blowing to me. Let's pull it apart and see if we can make it even better!
https://youtu.be/SuQGQ1vh9k0

@cabel @stroughtonsmith @marcedwards From a brief look I’ve had a while back, that stuff is stored as metadata in the car file (car files are a weird variant of BOM with support for various schema extensions and whatnot, fascinating stuff)

🙄

@stroughtonsmith I’m happy to have played a small role in this project 😝

Of all the apps in Creator Studio, it's Pixelmator Pro I was most interested in. I've never used Pixelmator before, it's also Apple's first and only pro app using Liquid Glass (Xcode doesn't count), and it's the first time it's been ported to iPad (pictured). I've been using Photoshop for nearly 30 years, and don't have an alternative. And from my casual testing so far, this team put an incredible amount of effort into doing this properly