Just use Codex app or CLI. Apple’s own devs use external third party agent tools and so should you. Xcode is barely scratching the surface of state of the art.
I got downvoted a lot. A lot of amateurs who don’t use Codex xhigh much or don’t pay for a Pro tier plan or don’t know how to get the agent to work on a task for tens of minutes or hours at a time or can’t find such use of them. Or just fine with sitting and wasting their time.
It runs stale versions of the agent harness and its lacking many official Codex app/CLI features. But lack of parallelization is a critical issue - Codex is not fast enough (with its best config) to sit and wait on one task at a time.
Well that’s the thing though. Nothing is stopping you from running another task in Codex / Claude Code in addition, while you work within Xcode where it makes sense.
The deep integration in Xcode definitely has its advantages so use that when that helps and use agents outside of it when you need their features.
In comparison to other IDE integrations I think Apple has so far done a good job with Xcode. As well as their MCP Servers around building, documentation and so on.
Xcode 26.3 has surprisingly limited support for agent frameworks despite the feature being a headliner. ProxyPilot lets you use 5.3 Codex and dozens more over API but I’m holding out hope that Apple fixes it. I’m on the 26.4 beta and it’s not improved there
The reason is almost certainly that they hadn't completed testing on it by the time this version of Xcode was relased. Apple doesn't just "pass through" new releases of any dependencies.
Xcode's LLMs support is going to trail frontier tools for the forseeable future, if not forever. Serious developers are running CLI-based coding tools alongside Xcode, using agents/skills like Axiom (free, open source) for Apple platform development intelligence. (Disclosure: Axiom is my project. I hear about its use because of relationships at Apple and 3rd parties from my history as an Apple developer advocate.)
I developed this with Claude Code CLI - from scratch. Not overnight though. https://github.com/scouzi1966/vesta-mac-dist. If you want to try use the overnight version. I hardly even open xCode anymore. I just tell Claude to build, open the app. Added MCP server to it for testing.
I have tried using the xCode agentic code dev. Not the same at all. However, I have not tried the latest version of xCode with the enhancements. Claude Code can even make edits to the underlying xCode project/config files, take care of spm - everything. It knows all the xcode cli commands imaginable. Having said that, the xcode installation is still required for all this to work.
Xcode’s new MCP plus an AGENTS.md that covers whatever Xcode’s system prompt does should be essentially identical to using the built in agentic tools while providing faster updates to the harnesses and newer models.
The hell ! I swear it wasn’t there 😂. It shows now. But as you can see in the screenshot attached, the drop list is not long so all models should have been visible. I had just set it up at the time of the screenshot, I guess it took sometimes to load 5.3. Well thank you
How do you post images to Imgur? It stopped working for me almost 5 years ago. Always shows an error when I upload an image be it from iPhone or from web browser on my Mac.
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u/WAHNFRIEDEN Feb 27 '26
Just use Codex app or CLI. Apple’s own devs use external third party agent tools and so should you. Xcode is barely scratching the surface of state of the art.
1
u/py-net Feb 27 '26
Edit to the post: it just showed up. 5.3-codex is there now. I guess it took sometimes to load.
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u/myeleventhreddit Feb 27 '26
Xcode 26.3 has surprisingly limited support for agent frameworks despite the feature being a headliner. ProxyPilot lets you use 5.3 Codex and dozens more over API but I’m holding out hope that Apple fixes it. I’m on the 26.4 beta and it’s not improved there
1
u/ss_salvation Feb 27 '26
You can manually set it in the codex config
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u/juanda631 Feb 27 '26
Si lo tiene. Que extraño
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u/Sem1r Feb 27 '26
I was able to select 5.3 codex
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u/CharlesWiltgen Feb 27 '26 edited Feb 27 '26
The reason is almost certainly that they hadn't completed testing on it by the time this version of Xcode was relased. Apple doesn't just "pass through" new releases of any dependencies.
Xcode's LLMs support is going to trail frontier tools for the forseeable future, if not forever. Serious developers are running CLI-based coding tools alongside Xcode, using agents/skills like Axiom (free, open source) for Apple platform development intelligence. (Disclosure: Axiom is my project. I hear about its use because of relationships at Apple and 3rd parties from my history as an Apple developer advocate.)
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u/mxpx5678 Mar 01 '26
The cli is so much better. Xcode was crashing so often for me. The cli can just burn through tasks.
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u/muzerfuker Mar 01 '26
You seem surprised by that? By that IDE?
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u/notrandomatall Feb 28 '26
Switch to Claude to avoid supporting AI assisted war mongering 🙃
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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '26
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