alt Hacker NewsI find it hard to believe xcodegen is in a state where it would reliably generate xcodeproj for all edge states (widgets, watchos app, notification extensions …) - it certainly wasn’t when I last tried it for Weathergraph few years ago.
That said, it might be well enough for simpler apps.
What's a not-simple app? I've had Claude generate:
* A Markdown viewer (obviously pretty simple)
* A menu bar Apple TV remote (surprisingly complicated)
* A menu bar and desktop temperature tracker for the silly Tapo temperature trackers I have all over my house (a little complicated because multiple user interfaces, a backing database, scheduling, and multiple local/remote protocol interfaces)
* A graphical CAS calculator frontend to Sage Math with LaTeX math rendering
* An LLMwiki implementation that uses macOS filesystem extensions to reflect a SQLite database into a local filesystem for agents to traverse (basically the new macOS way to do FUSE, fussy enough that the app has to run out of /Applications to work)
* An agent-driven Music.app replacement with AirPlay streaming support managing Apple Music catalogs and tracks
All of these have worked without me ever once touching the xcode UI, except one time to generate Apple Developer certificates, which I then drove exclusively from CLI tools.
These are all pretty modern SwiftUI applications.