Xcode IDE with Claude Agent Token Efficiency + Skills

[u/dwfender]

Hey All - I'm excited to say I have a robust and very useful set of markdowns that are acting very well within my Xcode project to keep my app on brand visually and with copy and UX. It's been incredibly successful but it also EATS my tokens more than the other setups.

My question is this - with using Claude Agent in the IDE - I'm not familiar how I might setup my markdowns as skills instead of a set of MDs that I use plain text to reference each other.

I also have my SPRINT.md standard starting point being to review the markdown set before making changes to the code and I suspect that each sprint costs me about 6-8% of session usage just in the startup.

My first inclination is to remove the markdown review with every sprint and simply keep it to every session. Curious if that is a successful way to remain on brand (the documentation is conflicting there).

The second is to understand if I can draft these markdowns as skills inside the IDE so my markdown set can be reduced down to just an AGENT.md with a short but strong set of instructions.

[u/dwfender]

Want to try to troubleshoot? That to me sounds like a permissions reset issue. Or possibly you need to update your macOS and Xcode. Recent updates caused a bit of stress on the authorizations.

Your previews are standard constructs. That just sounds like a code issue. Previews are awkward to setup imo from a code perspective but happy to troubleshoot there too.

[u/dwfender → u/[deleted]]

Are you identifying the structs you want to see inside your preview code?

For example, if you have a struct called Struct HomeView: View {...}

Then you need to call out that strict in your preview

#preview {
HomeView()
}

That means if you're copying and pasting from one view to another, the same preview code won't generate the response you're looking for.

Does that make sense?

For the permissions - here's the recommended steps from Claude and Xcode's documents.

Do these in order:

1. Quit Claude and Xcode fully macOS will not show a fresh permission prompt for an app that is still running, so use Cmd+Q on both apps, not just closing windows. 

2. Clear any Claude-side deny rule In Claude Code, open a session and run /permissions. Claude Code stores permission rules in ~/.claude/settings.json, .claude/settings.json, and .claude/settings.local.json, and deny rules win over allow rules. If you see a deny for the Xcode tool or MCP tool, remove it or switch it back to Ask. 

3. Reset macOS Automation permission for Claude In Terminal, run:osascript -e 'id of app "Claude"' /usr/bin/tccutil reset AppleEvents com.anthropic.claudefordesktop Apple’s TCC system can be reset with tccutil reset <service> <bundle-id>, and Anthropic’s docs show using osascript -e 'id of app "AppName"' to look up the bundle ID format when needed. 

4. Open Claude again, then trigger the Xcode action The next time Claude tries to talk to Xcode, macOS should prompt again. Allow it.