"Apple today introduced a major update to its Xcode development environment , the tool most developers use to build apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and even the Vision Pro. Xcode 26.3 is now available as a release candidate. This newest version substantially increases Apple's coding intelligence features with built-in support for agentic coding. This will allow autonomous coding agents to work directly inside the IDE."
"Allowing coding agents to work inside Xcode is not new. I demonstrated an earlier version of this capability back in November. The version 26.3 difference? Apple says that agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex can now handle complex development tasks. A shift from assistants to agents Apple is positioning this update as a major expansion of the basic intelligence features first introduced in Xcode 26. Here's why that matters:"
"Back in November, I was able to get "Hello, world" to work inside of Xcode. However, once I tried coding a complex iPhone app, the Xcode integration crashed and burned. The IDE regularly hung and crashed, rendering it unusable. I also found that Xcode was unable to fill out the wide range of IDE-based forms required to create an app."
Xcode 26.3 is available as a release candidate and embeds agentic coding capabilities to allow autonomous AI agents to operate inside the IDE. Agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex can build, test, and fix compile errors autonomously, expanding prior code-suggestion and conversational AI features into full agentic workflows. New visual checks use screenshots to validate UI behavior, though limits on device testing remain. Earlier Xcode integrations struggled with complex app creation, often crashing and failing to complete IDE forms, prompting some developers to run external agents in terminals to build iPhone, Mac, and Watch apps successfully.
Read at ZDNET
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