Conclusion

In this lesson you’ve learnt what GitHub Copilot is, and how you can use it to work alongside you in an iOS project.

You’ve seen how you can use Ask mode to query existing codebases, that you might have never seen, or might have forgotten about. Before then moving on to using Agent mode to actually implement app features, firstly based on your explicit instructions, and then using the spec you created in lesson 1.

GitHub Copilot for Xcode is a pretty powerful way that allows you to work with some of the latest AI tooling without (really) leaving Xcode. You can stay where you’re happy, and add some cool AI-tooling around the edges.

But this integration also has its consequences. Xcode is not the most extendable of applications, which limits how smooth the Copilot integration can be.

In the next lesson we’ll look at an alternative approach—using an IDE which has much better integrated AI-tooling, but doesn’t attempt to integrate with Xcode. We’ll see how this affects development workflow, and whether it’s a compromise that’s worth making.