r/Xcode • u/arnieistheman • 9d ago

Xcode codex agent work flow

Hi all,

I am trying to improve my Xcode agentic coding workflow. I am currently using GPT 5.5 codex model in the Xcode settings, which is quite good and fast at writing code but not the best for planning.

I am chatting with ChatGPT 5.6 sol regarding architectural decisions and communicate between the two of them via custom instruction md files.

This is of course not optimal from a workflow point of view, although it gets the job done efficiently and I can steer it very well, since I manually intervene all the time.

What would you suggest as a better workflow? Also, is there an **easy** way I can leave the Mac on and have the Xcode agent build while prompting from my iPhone remotely?

I have seen the hype about loops btw, but I guess that would lead to burning A LOT of tokens.

Any ideas?

Thank you very much in advance.

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u/Ok-Tomatillo-8712 9d ago

Are you on Xcode 27? The new /plan command is hot* fire

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u/arnieistheman 9d ago

Not yet on 27. What does it do?

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u/Ok-Tomatillo-8712 9d ago

Enters a mode for planning, it won’t write any code but will ask you follow up prompts for clarification/scope etc and generate a markdown plan for you. You can review it, comment on certain sections inline, discuss whatever until you’re happy with the plan, then /exit-plan and ask it to execute it. It’s really nice, and Xcode comes with new skills from Apple for Swift/SwiftUI that vastly improve the output quality

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u/arnieistheman 9d ago

Sounds great!

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u/CharlesWiltgen 9d ago

Xcode's built in coding harness is a good way to get started with AI-assisted coding, but professional developers generally move to dedicated coding harnesses to take advantage of their built-in capabilities and enormous skill/agent/tool ecosystems.

Also, is there an easy way I can leave the Mac on and have the Xcode agent build while prompting from my iPhone remotely?

Mature harnesses often of built-in remote access (probably Codex Remote in your case, I use Claude Code's Remote Control daily), and/or you can connect to terminal sessions remotely using tmux and something like Tailscale. The former is dead-simple, the latter is 10 minutes of learning with a little help from your favorite LLM.

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u/casco_oscuro 8d ago

I can’t add Claude as chat or agent in the 27 beta

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u/geralt_noble 4d ago

For the iPhone part, I'd look at running the agent in a persistent terminal session and controlling it remotely. tmux + SSH could be enough. Have you tried that setup?

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u/WAHNFRIEDEN 9d ago

Even Apple devs are using Codex or Claude Code. Try actual state of the art tools not whatever Apple is putting out but not using internally