The Xcode on-ramp
I’m a relative newcomer to using generative AI for software development. I came to it skeptical. I’d seen and heard plenty of cases of AI getting things laughably wrong, and beyond that, I’ve been a bit unsettled about what generative AI is doing to the software industry — and to the craft of building software. Not the most enthusiastic disposition to bring to a new tool.
What got past the skepticism, of all things, was Xcode. When Apple wired coding agents directly into the editor, I tried it because the friction was zero — it was just there, in the tool I was already using. And it turned out to be a transformative experience in a way I genuinely hadn’t expected. Not magic, but a real shift in what felt possible inside a normal day’s work.
The broader unease didn’t go anywhere, though. The industry I’ve spent years inside is changing shape under me, and I’m honestly not sure the version of it that’s coming has a place for the way I like to work. Sitting that out isn’t really an option, but pretending the question is settled because the tool happens to be good doesn’t feel right either. So I’m using it, and trying to pay attention to both things at once.
When I decided to build FeedFilters — the story of why is in the previous post — I wanted to see how that experience held up outside Xcode. Xcode is a great environment for Mac and iOS apps, but FeedFilters is a web app, and web apps come with a lot of concerns native apps don’t have to think about. I also wanted to see what working with Claude Code directly was like, not just the version Apple has integrated into Xcode.
So I’m using Claude Code, via the Code section of the Claude app. The early going has been promising enough that I’ve stuck with it for the whole build. Going in, the things I’m curious about are pretty concrete:
- How well does Claude do across genuinely different layers of a project — backend, frontend, deployment, design — rather than just within one of them?
- How does the velocity hold up over weeks of work, not just an afternoon?
- Where does the quality fall off, and what kind of review cadence does that suggest?
- What can I let it run with, and what do I need to stay close to?
I’ll write honestly about what I find once I have enough miles on the tool to be fair to it. For now this is just the setup: the why of choosing Claude, and the things I’m planning to pay attention to. The bigger questions — what the work and the community look like a few years from now, and whether there’s still a place for me in them — aren’t going to get settled by one project. But Claude can help me take a personal project way further than I could on my own.