There was something missing from Xcode, and that was a tool called Swift Assist. Apple announced that tool, which was intended to help developers write code using AI, at WWDC last year. It possibly reflects some of the failures of Apple’s internal AI development projects that the tool hasn’t yet shipped, and the introduction of support for ChatGPT hints that perhaps it won’t.
In the run up to WWDC, expectations had built that Apple might work with Anthropic to power the AI inside Xcode 26. This hasn’t happened, but perhaps that situation will change once the new ’26-branded Apple operating systems ship this fall. Developers equipped with an Anthropic API key can access the service, however, and it is good the company has chosen not to lock developers into one AI approach.
What the developers are thinking
While it is a little early to say for sure, Apple developers do seem accepting of this integration. One developer very swiftly switched on Xcode 26 to build a fully on-device AI ChatBot that makes use of Apple’s Foundation models, making full use of ChatGPT’s code-complete help when he did. “I leaned on the new code-complete features in Xcode to scaffold the project ridiculously fast. There were bugs, of course, but it significantly sped up the development of boilerplate code,” he wrote.
Read the full article here
