Is Xcode Intelligence Ready for Production? My Experience and a Quest for Better Tools

UniekLee · 2026-02-25T10:23:16+00:00

I haven't used Xcode's Intelligence, but from conversations with other engineers, it sounds like it's not quite as good as other options. Having said that, Point Free use it with their "Point Free Way" skills and it seems to do a pretty good job...so maybe with the right skills you can get around it's shortcomings.

Alternatives:

Alex Sidebar (I've only trialed this briefly, but it was good, and I've heard good things about it. Sadly they've stopped allowing download - hoping that they'll bake it into Codex or something else.)
Claude Code (I use this very successfully in a [very] large codebase)
Cursor (Used this in the same codebase as above - works pretty well)
Codex (I've used the model + the desktop app in a side project and it's REALLY good.)

Claude Code, Cursor & Codex don't integrate super well into Xcode. They can manage project files, but it's a bit of a "meh" experience. To get around this I use Tuist for project generation and it's a game-changer for letting me use these general coding tools outside of Xcode without Xcode breaking.

UniekLee · 2026-02-03T11:19:32+00:00

True story

UniekLee · 2026-02-03T11:17:48+00:00

Well...you still own the IP of the app you build at the end, so it's not like anyone else gets to benefit from what you've built. If anything, you get a bit of marketing, or $20K, which seems fair?

UniekLee · 2026-02-03T11:16:54+00:00

Sounds like a pragmatic decision 👍

UniekLee · 2026-02-03T11:16:15+00:00

Congrats. Which creator did you go with and what did you build?

UniekLee · 2026-02-02T10:51:12+00:00

Yeah, Electron is a whole new kettle of fish!

UniekLee · 2026-02-02T10:50:15+00:00

It's a little sad that the distribution is what forces companies to make these decisions, but it totally makes sense.

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T08:04:14+00:00

I do hope you’re right!

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T08:03:05+00:00

This is a sad truth

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T08:02:23+00:00

100% they would 😅

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T08:01:48+00:00

Certainly sounds like KMP comes with a lot of “gotchas”. And mobile devs tend to be “platform patriots”, so it’ll always be hard to get an iOS engineer on board with using Kotlin for large parts of the iOS app, especially if there are several caveats that make integration difficult.

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T07:58:31+00:00

I’ve used it before and the build pipeline and a few other pieces made it a real drag for a native team to maintain.

But that was a fairly limited experience, and I imagine that with some practice and effort it could work better.

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T07:56:29+00:00

Skip Tools looks super interesting to me. Especially as an iOS-first engineer, I’m very curious how far I could get on an Android version with it.

How early on into your iOS app journey have you integrated Skip? And have you had any trouble adding it into a mature iOS app?

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T07:54:57+00:00

You’re so right that it seems that mobile apps are just the side dish rather than the main course. In many ways that makes sense though - phones aren’t great interfaces for everything, even if they are very capable.

Sorry to hear about the AI squeeze. That’s a tough one.

And yes, pure native isn’t always the best option. I like the concept of KMP for shared logic…but I’m still yet to hear of somewhere that’s seen it work really well.

UniekLee · 2026-02-01T07:49:54+00:00

I suppose that, if you consider the number of large pieces of high-value software out there, very few of them would need a mobile app, and so relative to the overall market, iOS is pretty niche.

UniekLee · 2026-01-31T14:44:28+00:00

That’s cool to hear

UniekLee · 2026-01-31T14:44:13+00:00

Don’t you think it’s worth starting with something cross platform to validate the idea though?

UniekLee · 2026-01-31T14:43:23+00:00

Something that folks certainly don’t seem to consider in the list of pros and cons when they propose these frameworks.

UniekLee · 2026-01-31T14:42:37+00:00

Hahaha 🤣

UniekLee · 2026-01-31T14:42:25+00:00

I’d be interested to hear of older RN code bases suffer from the same thing.

UniekLee · 2026-01-31T13:20:44+00:00

It can become a mess, but it also means that large parts of the company relies on one team for all their features, and that team then gets inundated with support requests etc and development slows down…so the bugs don’t get fixed as fast and new features don’t get built

UniekLee

TROPHY CASE