Xcode AI Coding Assistance Option(s)

Not finding a lot on the Swift Assist technology announced at WWDC 2024. Does anyone know the latest status? Also, currently I use OpenAI's macOS app and its 'Work With...' functionality to assist with Xcode development, and this is okay, certainly saves copying code back and forth, but it seems like AI should be able to do a lot more to help with Xcode app development.

I guess I'm looking at what people are doing with AI in Visual Studio, Cline, Cursor and other IDEs and tools like those and feel a bit left out working in Xcode. Please let me know if there are AI tools or techniques out there you use to help with your Xcode projects.

Thanks in advance!

Answered by zentention in 822600022

This is the only reliable tool I found @willoughby: Alex Sidebar

The forums are not allowing me to attach a link. But you can find it easily. It’s backed by YCombinator

Accepted Answer

This is the only reliable tool I found @willoughby: Alex Sidebar

The forums are not allowing me to attach a link. But you can find it easily. It’s backed by YCombinator

Thank you, I'll give the free version a try. I immediately don't like that I can't use local LLMs or my own API keys, but okay for now.

Also, since Apple engineers stalk this forum: I'm sure Apple must be on this in some way, shape, or form (whether alone or in partnership with OpenAI), but please train and release a Computer-Using Agent on at least Xcode (preferably on the entire UI as well as all of your first-party apps).

Within 6-18 months I'd like my Mac's desktop CUA to be working 24x7 on improving my code. I give even odds OpenAI already has a prototype of this working internally. The obvious benefit to Apple are the endless skid palettes of Mac minis that will be sold for use as dedicated agent servers both for personal and business use. My pet theory as to why Swift Assist has vanished is something even better such as this sort of Xcode-savvy CUA is on the way.

Make it so, Apple!

Update: Alex Sidebar is indeed useful, definitely a cut above the ChatGPT macOS app for AI-assisted/AI-pair programming in Xcode. Also, it appears I spoke too soon re: not being able to use other/local LLMs via API. Have not tested this yet but it does seem possible from what I briefly saw on Discord.

Overall, it's not the equivalent of something like the Roo Code extention to VS Code in terms of being able to build working, multi-source-file projects from a mere idea prompt, but it helps. Many thanks for suggesting it!

No, @willoughby. You can use local LLMs and your own API keys. Alex supports these features. The advantage of using their own model (assisted by Claude and reinforced with reasoning from DeepSeek) is that it has probably been trained on Apple’s latest documentation and slightly better tuned for Swift development. This is just an anecdote but I’ve noticed better responses through their own model compared to using API keys to directly send prompts to the LLM services. And Alex doesn’t store any of your chats on their servers and I remember seeing on their documentation that even the LLMs they’re using behind the scenes don’t get to keep your requests. So, it’s also designed to be private.

On another note, I recommend not using ChatGPT because it has been established to be significantly worse than Claude (yes, including o1 and o1 Pro, which are also severely out of date in their knowledge of Swift SDKs).

Yes, even during my brief tests of Alex Sidebar I did notice the increased competence of Sonnet over OpenAI 4o/o1. Have been thinking of cancelling my GPTPlus subscription and will probably do so after I get to play with o3-mini (release purportedly any day now).

The expectation that Swift Assist would have been trained on the latest APIs and docs and internal code at Apple was really exciting, but that thing is nowhere to be found as far as I can tell. It is called Swift Assist, right? All I remember is the WWDC session where they quickly build a "Classic Macs" demo app and it looked excellent.

Again, I expect Apple have something even better cooking. Either that or it's just taking them a lot longer than expected to train a model that works well. Alex Sidebar is probably about as good as a third-party can do, though I expect their business may be short-lived when and if Apple steps in with a real first-party solution.

It appears Apple have indefinitely delayed Swift Assist @willoughby. Possibly due to the severe technical challenges they’re facing with Apple Intelligence as a whole (which includes features like Swift Assist). They won’t respond, so, don’t count on them. Swift Assist is currently a broken promise and they didn’t even bother to update/delete their own Newsroom article about it. They haven’t responded to my/anyone’s emails about this either. They also officially mentioned in the Daring Fireball podcast that they were training Swift Assist with licensed publicly available Swift code. Not internal code which should have better coding practices. Meaning, given their poor quality homegrown LLM as of now, Swift Assist will be inferior to existing players like Claude. The only advantage that Swift Assist will have is that they promised it will immediately know any SDK changes Apple makes internally, which third party LLMs like Claude cannot know until they’ve retrained to bring forth knowledge cutoff. Again, Claude is better than ChatGPT for Swift code. ChatGPT is well-known due to it being the first of its kind, but it is now fully established that it is not the best of its kind. For AI search, it's Perplexity AI > Copilot >= SearchGPT > Gemini. For Swift code, it's Claude >>>>> ChatGPT > Gemini >= Meta, etc.

Xcode AI Coding Assistance Option(s)
 
 
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