Show HN: AgentSwift – Open-source iOS builder agent
github.comI'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.
This is neat!
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?
Not the author but it likely means running automated UI tests in the sim, yes. This involves running the app and programmatically selecting and sending interaction events.
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!
as someone who's likely never going to dive into this i am curious, what's the upside here using this over.. claude code and plugging in xcode mcp server(s) alongside xcode ? I see it uses claude anyways, I'm just curious if you've designed some additional guardrailing or features here.
I was wondering the same, that's basically exactly what Claude already does out of the box without having to use some custom GUI layer on top.
> Describe what you want to build, and AgentSwift uses Claude to discover your project, implement changes, build, run, and validate — without you touching Xcode.
Hi! This is a truly experimental project but the goal is something closer to Replit for native swift than Claude Code.
I hacked it together in a weekend it's not that serious.
As someone in this space, I think that devs haven’t realized yet that they can’t just use open source skills or agents out of the box. They likely have intricate rules and restrictions in their industry or company culture that they need to tailor-fit the agent to. They might take a few pointers from what’s out there, but they’d ultimately have to build their own.
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.
I've had good success with Opencode and Codex straight up in the XCode project folder. It was able to change the XCode project settings etc., no skills.md or agents.md or anything, no problem. It was a fairly new project though.
Can you explain the use cases we can cover by leveraging this?