Apple has released Xcode 26.3 with native support for “agentic coding,” enabling developers to work alongside powerful AI coding agents, including Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex, directly within the macOS development environment.
This update marks a significant shift in Apple’s tooling strategy, introducing autonomous AI capabilities that handle entire tasks from planning to implementation, verification, and iteration, all without leaving Xcode.
The new feature set builds on the AI assistant introduced in Xcode 26, but goes further by allowing agents to operate with greater autonomy. Instead of responding to step-by-step prompts, agents in Xcode 26.3 can now execute long-running tasks, interact with the full project architecture, and visually verify their work using Xcode Previews. This represents a fundamental change in how software is developed on Apple platforms, supporting a more goal-oriented coding paradigm.
Anthropic’s Claude Agent integration leverages the Claude Agent SDK, granting agents access to subagents, background tasking, and plugin systems within the IDE. This allows Claude to reason across complex app structures, SwiftUI, UIKit, SwiftData, and more, autonomously determining what needs to change, where, and how. Claude can visually inspect user interfaces via Previews and iterate based on what it sees, closing the feedback loop without human intervention.
OpenAI’s Codex, meanwhile, is integrated into Xcode through a similar agentic model and is also available in a standalone Codex desktop app for macOS. Designed as a command center for orchestrating multiple agents across projects, the Codex app allows developers to manage isolated agent threads, coordinate parallel tasks, and leverage specialized “skills” that bundle tools and scripts for broader workflows, including game development, testing, and beyond. Codex agents can run independently for hours or days, building, debugging, and shipping code with minimal supervision.
Apple has implemented the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to ensure extensibility beyond Claude and Codex. MCP offers an open standard for integrating any compatible AI agent into Xcode’s environment, including command-line tools and future models. This flexibility opens the door for organizations to bring their own agents into the Apple ecosystem, potentially shaping how internal teams build software.
Xcode 26.3 is available now as a release candidate to members of the Apple Developer Program, with a full release coming soon on the Mac App Store. The update supports development across all Apple platforms, including iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS.
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