Swift Assist, Part Deux

Apple embraces the fast pace of developer tools and AI

This year, John Voorhees and I returned to the scene of the crime—the place where we got a demo in 2024 of Swift Assist, a feature that never shipped that we could’ve sworn we saw demoed live—to see the updated Xcode with AI assistance. Same room, same people, but this time the feature wasn’t just promised, it was shipping in Developer Beta 1. More to the point, as John writes on MacStories, Apple had entirely rearchitected the tool so that deve…

Swift Assist, Part Deux

At WWDC 2024, I attended a developer tools briefing with Jason Snell, Dan Moren, and John Gruber. Later, I wrote about Swift Assist, an AI-based code generation tool that Apple was working on for Xcode. That first iteration of Swift Assist caught my eye as promising, but I remember asking at the time whether it could modify multiple files in a project at once and being told it couldn't. What I saw was rudimentary by 2025's standards with things …