Issue 706

4^th April 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about Apple and AI. People are wondering where Swift Assist is and speculating endlessly on what caused the next generation Siri product to be delayed into 2026.

I won’t discuss Siri since you’ve likely read enough on that topic already. However, I have thoughts on Predictive Code Completion and Swift Assist in Xcode.

When I first wrote about Xcode’s Predictive Code Completion, I was complimentary about it. However, I must admit I didn’t stick with it for very long. It wasn’t terrible by any means but it got in the way more than it helped. In contrast, I find other AI coding tools help much more than they hinder. Since then I have continued using Copilot, tried Claude Code, integrated ChatGPT with Xcode, and made extensive use of Cursor. All these tools are quite different, but all are far ahead of Predictive Code Completion. Yes, GPT integration with Xcode is clunky due to how the apps interact with each other, but the results from the AI are good.

Swift Assist being delayed isn’t a huge deal in itself. But if it arrives and isn’t state of the art, that’s a much bigger problem. I’m not speculating on whether it will or won’t be, but it’s on my mind that the shipped features of Apple Intelligence aren’t keeping pace with the market leaders.

I’ve speculated before that I’d be surprised if Apple allowed employees to access ChatGPT and other online AI tools internally. The company is so focused on secrecy that I can’t believe they’d let people type potentially secret things into these services, regardless of their data privacy, training, and retention policies.

That said, I hope Apple allows and even encourages the teams working on Predictive Code Completion and Swift Assist to use all the AI coding tools. They need to know precisely what the state of the art is to meet that standard when it ships, especially since it has been delayed.

I can’t wait to see what Apple delivers with Swift Assist and how they continue to improve Predictive Code Completion. With it being challenging to write iOS and Mac apps in other editors/IDEs, Xcode needs to keep up with the rest of the industry to continue attracting people to the Swift language.

Dave Verwer

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News

There are two major Swift news items this week, the first being the release of Swift 6.1 and Xcode 16.3. Holly Borla has written up all you need to know about the Swift release, with improvements to concurrency, Objective-C interop, SwiftPM package traits, custom Swift Testing traits, and DocC improvements. 👍

The next piece of Swift news might turn out to be bigger than the 6.1 release in the long term. Chris McGee introduces swiftly, originally a community-built tool to install Swift toolchains on Linux, but now an official Swift project that can install them on macOS, too. There’s never been an easier way to install a nightly toolchain.

Tools

I’ve linked to several apps that helped design haptic feedback over the years, but with one exception, they are all now gone. Do we need a new one? Vedprakash Wagh believes we do, so he built one! It’s free to design basic patterns and a one-time purchase for advanced mode. It looks great.

Code

I almost missed when Alexander Weiß’s published this article about the much requested new (ish) feature of DocC, multiple target support. This is a really valuable feature to bring documentation all into one place, and I’m happy to see it ship!

It’s nice to see John Sundell back writing after his hiatus. In his first article, he tackles those pesky “bangs” that are likely scattered all over your codebase on static URLs. He also talks about removing optionals from constructing dynamic URLs.

Khan Winter with a story about compiling Swift on Linux and building a Discord bot. Swiftly (from this week’s News section) gets a mention, too:

Shoutout to the new Swiftly tool too, I got to try that out while I was writing this up and it’s a huge improvement.

Maybe this will inspire you to try Swift on a different platform?

And finally...

Intel inside 🤖