Apple embraces the fast pace of developer tools and AI
This year, John Voorhees and I returned to the scene of the crime—the place where we got a demo in 2024 of Swift Assist, a feature that never shipped that we could’ve sworn we saw demoed live—to see the updated Xcode with AI assistance. Same room, same people, but this time the feature wasn’t just promised, it was shipping in Developer Beta 1.
More to the point, as John writes on MacStories, Apple had entirely rearchitected the tool so that developers can use any AI system they want and update to new models as they become available:
I’m not a developer, so I’m not going to review Swift Assist (a name that is conspicuously absent from Apple’s developer tool press release, by the way), but the changes are so substantial that the feature I was shown this year hardly resembles what I saw in 2024. Unlike last year’s demo, this version can revise multiple project files and includes support for multiple large language models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been tuned to work with Swift and Xcode. Getting started with ChatGPT doesn’t require an OpenAI account, but developers can choose to use their account credentials from OpenAI or another provider, like Anthropic. Swift Assist also supports local model integration. If your chosen AI model takes you down a dead end, code changes can be rolled back incrementally at any time.
This is perhaps the best sign that Apple’s attitude toward AI and Apple’s role in the world has changed dramatically since 2024. If, in late 2025 or early 2026, a new coding model becomes all the rage with developers, Xcode will be able to use that model. That’s a big step forward for Apple.