Claude Code is pretty good at Swift + Swift UI. I created and have been iterating on a menubar app for myself that I plan to share with a small team. I'd prefer to do this native than go through a 3rd party solution.
I do have prior experience developing for iOS but that was pre-swift.
I'm also just working on my first iOS Swift app (Mostly for myself, don't know yet if I'll make it public as it's just a clone of Swarm / Gowalla but based on OpenStreetMap data) and it works really well with Claude Code.
I'm not using the Xcode integration and so there's still some rough parts where build errors show up in Xcode and I then have to paste them into my Terminal.
When you are used to backend work...it's kinda fun to see an app come to life and run on your phone though.
why are you using the xcode UI at all? you can ask claude to run the build via CLI, which will return build errors that claude can read and fix itself until it works. it can even take screenshots from the simulator to debug the app UI.
Mostly because I'm still very new to it and I use it to publish the app to my phone. There's probably a way to do via CLI but for now it's easier to see progress and flip some config values in the UI if you don't know yet where all the files are.
xcode's new AI using claude is not performing as well as claude code for me. I've tried a couple times and quickly fall back to using vscode with xcode sitting in a window beside. I don't mind the copypaste of warnings and errors since my workflow is less vibe and more directed/iterative.
I do have prior experience developing for iOS but that was pre-swift.