Xcode Intelligence Chat Agent Changes Overwrite Entire File

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I have this local agent using Qwen 3.6 (the version that is ~17 GB). Last time I tried using this a couple months ago it worked ok.

Now the agent frequently does not know how to edit a file. It takes its proposed changes and completely overwrites the entire source file with the change instead of just modifying the portion of the source code. Sometimes the agent thinks it doesn't have permission to make a change and wants me to copy and paste code.

Is there an Xcode skill provided somewhere that I can use with the Agent so it knows how to work in this environment properly? Currently I have it set up via "Chat" with "Tools Enabled" and "Automatically apply changes" is on.

Answer 1

Developer Tools Engineer OP

Apple

43m

The good news is that this “chat” agent built into Xcode has not changed. It should be virtually identical to how it was the last time you tried it — although I’m sorry to hear you had bad luck with it recently.

The bad news is also that this “chat” agent built into Xcode hasn’t changed! As the industry has shifted toward much more sophisticated coding agents, our focus has moved toward supporting those agents with our ACP support on the client side and MCP support on the tools side.

I’d recommend trying either Codex, which supports a custom model configuration, or an open source ACP agent, which should make these models that want much more sophisticated sets of tools than anyone could support a year ago behave much better.