The fact that xAI uploaded someone's home directory, including their SSH keys, is giving me serious pause at my choices here.

Generally, I don't worry about my machine being "blown up". I don't have a TON of unreproducible stuff on my machine. Everything is backed up, committed to git, and the like. I can restore most of it in a couple hours.

That said, I really, really don't want my .SSH directory sent to an AI agent and it's silly to prompt your way around that. You need to block it at the system level. I'm considering a separate user and then 700 permissions on my home directory.

I feel like we're back to 1990's security here. The double-edged sword is that it's helping us get things done at a pace like never before.

I'm not throwing shade here, I'm among the guilty.

Surprisingly, it's very easy. This works like a charm: https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool

You do not need to upload to TestFlight or the App Store; you can just install the app locally to your iPhone via usb -- even from Linux!

When in doubt, just ask your coding agent of choice to help you create and upload a Hello World iOS app. It's really easy.

> I had Claude Code create mine: I told Claude, more or less: I want to archive, Developer ID-sign, notarize, staple, and install this app to /Applications without ever opening Xcode. Write me a script that does the whole chain and fails loudly if any step breaks.

Even though the text we're reading is Claude talking to us as well :)

Also it was weird to see the mention of "ask your LLM" at almost every stage in the blog post:

> point Claude Code or your LLM coding tool of choice to this blog post, and let it figure it out

> When in doubt, ask your LLM of choice about them and have it help you get set up. It’s the one that’s going to be using Xcode for you anyway.

> The whole point of using the LLM in the first place is to avoid doing things manually that you don’t want to do.

> Again, if in doubt, ask Claude Code or your LLM of choice to create this for you.

> Again, this is why you talk to your LLM, tell it what you want, and have it help build your workflow.

In addition to a deep roster of skills and agencts, Axiom includes several for-LLM tools². xclog, xcprof, xcsym, and xcui are designed to be used by LLMs, and expose capabilities in a token-efficient way. These tools are equally helpful for non-Axiom skills/agents.

¹ Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ ² Axiom CLI tools: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/tools/

Having spent many years fighting with Xcode professionally, I was thrilled when swift build came out, and then appalled at how badly Xcode adopted it. Eventually I realized that you can set up your entire app as a swift package, and then the Xcode project with a single main source file that calls some `app_main()` (or whatever you want to call it) function in your package.

I cannot remember exactly but there was something annoying about setting up a new project; I think by default Xcode assumes that you want a swift package to be treated as a dependency that is checked out from git, but there was a way to drag and drop a local dependency in the same project directory and then it worked.

What this buys you is that files are no longer tracked by Xcode, so renames/merges no longer trigger project.pbxproj surgery. Instead you specify the swift package directories and are done.

I used this for some large personal projects and was very happy with it.

At one point I also wrote my own build tool that imitated all of the steps that Xcode took so that I could truly be Xcode-free. That also worked (and was not even that hard) but I went back to Xcode because the debugger UI was better than what I could get out of VS Code at the time, and especially because I was playing around with the Metal debugger.

Xcode is a [buggy as hell] GUI wrapper for a lot of system-level UNIX utilities and apps [which are generally, not so buggy].

Using CLI to release apps is a pretty old practice; at least as long as I've been doing it (I released my first Xcode app in 2012).

honestly would not even know what to do / click in xcode

That said, it might be well enough for simpler apps.

Its basis is React, so the code output quality is much higher than Swift because there is much more React code in LLM training data.

Everything is in the command line, and debugging is a breeze because it's a web view. But once it's compiled to native iOS, it feels like any other native app.

Expo + Fastlane = fully automated iOS submission and deployment. I issue one command and see a new version in the App Store.

1. https://sweetpad.hyzyla.dev/

2. https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad

"Next, open Xcode"

Interestingly, since about Opus 4.6, Claude has been able to reason its way into this process on its own. It was clunky until 4.7, and in 4.8 it's managed to find its way around every reason I had to open xcode myself.

Claude was great at figuring out what was broken when and either fixing it, or clicking as far as it could until it needed me.

You could say I'm mostly just IRL hands for the AI now.

https://github.com/software-mansion/argent

or

https://github.com/callstack/agent-device

both callstack and swmansion are mostly react native shops but those should work even in native ios/android as well

React Native and Flutter seem to be much more predictable for the bots (and more fun for humans, since they have actual hot reload).

I did end up somehow installing Xcode via some shady download and was on my way. But the whole ordeal left a very sour taste.