Agentic Coding with Xcode

Xcode has had some sort of coding assistance available for quite some time, if you include autocomplete in that category. Xcode 16, released back in 2024, introduced the first part of the modern AI strategy in the form of Swift Assist. This feature allowed developers to query an AI about the latest features and SDKs straight from Xcode.

Xcode 16 also included predictive code completion, which was powered by local machine learning models developed by Apple. This feature offered developers smarter, context-aware suggestions while coding. This was confined, however, to models Apple provided. The AI and ML landscape was much richer and evolving quicker than Apple could keep up with.

So in Xcode 26, Xcode gained the ability to hook directly into external models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. Users could log into external services via the settings pane, and the new Code Assist feature allowed developers to carry on conversations with those AI systems.

Let’s look to see how easy it is to enable that. Now, if you go to Xcode and go to Settings, there is now an Intelligence section inside the settings. You do need to be on a modern version of macOS for this. I’m running Tahoe 26.3 here. I believe you do need at least 26.0 to have this work.

This is the place where you can choose which provider you want to use. Built-in to Xcode from the get-go is OpenAI, which are the makers of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, which is the makers of Claude. You can add your own external providers if you want. We won’t do that here, but that is a possibility.

Now, I already have OpenAI hooked in on my system. Pretty easy. Go to OpenAI. You enable ChatGPT in Xcode. You can do that without a ChatGPT account. I’ve signed into mine here. Get a basic plan. You get some example tokens, some free tokens to be able to use, to be able to try things out. So you don’t necessarily need a paid plan. If you’re going to be doing a lot with it, you should pick up a paid plan.

And then we also have enabled Codex, which is ChatGPT’s or OpenAI’s agent that they have made up to work with their back-end models.

Similarly to OpenAI is Anthropic, and here again, you can log into your Claude account. You can also get the Claude agent, which you will need to do any agentic AI, which we’ll talk about later in this module. I’ve already enabled that under the OpenAI section by getting the Codex agent.

There are some other settings that you can choose down here for allowing the agents to use integrated internet access tools so it can reach out to the internet, find new information if it needs to. You can even give it access to Bash command line commands. That can be a little tricky. That’s hopefully very secure under what Xcode allows it to do. But allowing AI agents to issue command line commands makes me uneasy, but your mileage may vary.

And then you can also have other third-party tools be able to call things like Xcode Build on the command line. You can enable that here.

In the next video, we’ll walk through a starter project to get an idea of what we accomplish there, but what we could potentially ask an agentic AI to help us with and see what agentic AI is all about.