I'm working on a coding agent for building iOS apps. It's built on openspec and xcodebuildmcp. It's free and open source. |
I'm working on a coding agent for building iOS apps. It's built on openspec and xcodebuildmcp. It's free and open source. |
Can you elaborate on “boots the app on a simulator or macOS, runs UI automation to verify behavior”
Does this handle screen captures similar to Playwright for web?
I built an app with Codex recently (to control codex/cc remotely, funnily enough) and without any skills/plugins, it was booting the simulator and running tests to verify something(?)
It seemed mostly to ensure that the app didn’t crash in certain scenarios, but it could by no means “see” what was on the screen.
I still had to do all the manual validation myself, mostly around perf/touch targets.
Curious if your tool does that or if there’s another solution out there?
Your previous experience was probably the agent running regular unit tests, which obviously don’t need ui environment, but mostly *do* need an iOS runtime, which is why it needs to boot the simulator.
An idiosyncrasy of the way unit tests are executed in Xcode is that they run from the actual app deployment target, and so while running unit tests you’ll also see any app initialisation and background tasks running at the same time. It’s quite a good idea to use compiler directives or launch arguments to disable the usual app setup in the App or App Delegate. Why this isn’t a built in option is beyond me, but it’s definitely confusing behaviour when you’re just running isolated tests!
Looks like built-in UI testing was launched at WWDC 2015, so I missed it by a year!
I hacked it together in a weekend it's not that serious.
> Describe what you want to build, and AgentSwift uses Claude to discover your project, implement changes, build, run, and validate — without you touching Xcode.
An excellent metaphor for this is using third party libraries for a button. You look up what’s available in the open, but then your design or product team has insanely specific behaviors simply not provided by any open source library.