Honest question.

I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch.

Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day.

What is so horrible about XCode?

This is not hype-chasing. AI is a key part of software engineering now. For this to be absent from Xcode would be an existential risk for the future of the product.

For the record, I started using Xcode before it was called that and people have said this almost every year since. As I recall there was a big hit to its quality when they converted it to obj-c’s short lived garbage collection, and it felt like it never got back to reliable after that.

A lot of macOS needs that. There are some terrific ideas under the hood, but it’s as if people left halfway through implementing them.

Bugfixes won't make shareholders happy while shoving AI down our throats will.

Idk, I feel like these coding assistant features aren’t that hard to add, but can provide a lot of value to developers. Most or all popular IDEs now support similar features.

I don’t disagree that Apple could use a major focus on bug fixing across their platforms right now though.

> Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix

Claude code 8 hours later: It's done, mate!

True that Xcode needs yet another rebuild from scratch. If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work. However adding support for Claude is still a huge win. Could lead the way to making the transition to a sane IDE possible / reasonable. This would require leadership that’s completely absent at the company.

> Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/

It's not even rotting away. It was never completed.

It's XCode 26, and you still can't have the navigator and tabs work like in all other software on all other operation system, also including MacOS.

It's absolutely bonkers, and one of the reason's I decided to use Emacs if possible when working on "XCode projects".

XCode is good for project-reconfiguration and step-by-step debugging, but as an editor it's absolutely unusable.

A full rebuild might be throwing out the baby with the bath water. As someone who’s been using it since it was known as Project Builder, bugs seem mostly concentrated in the XIB/Storyboard editor (formerly known as a Interface Builder), SwiftUI live preview, and SwiftPM package resolve.

In a project with code-only UIKit, only a smattering of SwiftUI for small components, and minimal dependencies, Xcode isn’t too bad of an experience and I’d say comparable to and in some ways better than Android Studio (that localization XML editor, not mention Gradle… ugh).