Best Xcode AI tools in 2025 🛠️

The tooling landscape is changing dramatically for software developers across all platforms.

If you develop iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, or visionOS apps, then follow along to improve your coding workflows.

Link to this headingYour AI code editor

Your code editor of choice provides the majority of the benefits you're going to get from AI since that's where you spend most of your time.

We'll get into more further down, but you're here because you're also aware that Xcode is severely lagging behind other AI-native editors.

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that integrates with frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more.

I've been using it for at least a year now, and in my opinion, it's the best AI code editor on the market.

Command+K allows you to highlight code and edit or generate code inline via prompting, and Composer allows you to agentically create projects from scratch or build features spanning multiple files with prompting as well.

Others like Windsurf are close though, but they're each opinionated so it's worth exploring alternatives if you don't like Cursor.

Link to this headingBeyond the editor

Often, there are supplementary tools that make your life easier.

For example web devs have access to AI tools like v0.dev to build entire frontends for their full-stack apps.

For us on Apple platforms, most of us have had the experience of copy+pasting code from ChatGPT, Claude, or the web to Xcode.

This workflow has improved slightly now that ChatGPT has the 'works with' beta, which allows it to access the file you have opened in Xcode as additional context automatically.

While it's not as helpful as Cursor's entire codebase access, it's better than having to copy and paste a file into ChatGPT to get suggested edits.

And it's useful if you find yourself hitting limits on Cursor's allotted usage on their plans. For example, it costs $0.40 per request to use o1 even with Cursor's Pro plan.

Otherwise, the one other app I've found useful is Copilot for Xcode, which is an extension that integrates AI features into Xcode, including chat, code generation, and autocompletion.

Similarly, there's Copilot for Xcode, which is GitHub's own plugin based on their Copilot product.

I've found these to be hit or miss UX wise, but if you want to stay within Xcode, then these are your best options.

Link to this headingXcode 16 AI features

Xcode 16 finally has something built in, but it's still barely useful.

Others have gotten into why it's bad, but overall Xcode's predictive code generation just takes too long and doesn't reliably help you.

With any luck, Xcode 17 will be competitive with alternatives and include native prompting features and Cursor Composer-like code generation.

Link to this headingSummary

I spend most of my time developing Apple platforms codebases in Cursor, and use ChatGPT's works with integration with Xcode for accessing o1, their reasoning model.

Unfortunately, all AI code editors don't work well with visionOS codebases in particular because of the new APIs, so reasoning models help with this.

Finally, if you got something out of this and/or would like to see additional detail, I'd love to hear from you on X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn.