by Tim Hardwick
At WWDC 2024, Apple announced Swift Assist, an AI-powered coding companion integrated into Xcode 16 that’s designed to assist developers by generating code from natural language prompts. At the time, Apple said Swift Assist would be coming “later this year.”
We’re now three months into 2025, and it’s nowhere to be seen.
Swift Assist (Image: Apple)
Unlike Apple Intelligence, Swift Assist never appeared in beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s been delayed or cancelled. The company has since released Xcode 16.3 beta 2, and as Michael Tsai points out, it’s not even mentioned in the release notes.
Swift Assist is different from the new predictive code completion engine in Xcode 16 that can suggest the code developers need and runs locally on a developer’s device. Here’s how Apple described Swift Assist in its Platforms State of the Union:
Building an app is more than just typing code. It’s about transforming entire ideas into code. And the easiest way to do that is with natural language. So we created a larger and more powerful model that runs in the cloud. And crafted a unique experience in Xcode that only Apple could deliver. Introducing Swift Assist, a companion for all your coding tasks. And whether you know exactly what you’re after, or want help writing the best Swift code, Swift Assist can answer your coding questions and help with tasks like experimenting with new APIs.
Swift Assist knows Apple’s latest SDKs and Swift language features, so you’ll always get up-to-date and modern code that blend perfectly into your project. So now, tasks like exploring new frameworks and experimenting with new ideas are just one request away. Like all Apple developer services, Swift Assist is built with your privacy and security in mind. Your code is never stored on the server. It’s only used for processing your request, and most importantly, Apple doesn’t use it for training machine learning models. Swift Assist and the new predictive completions will turbo charge the way you work in Xcode. This marks the beginning of a journey to add extraordinary intelligence into our tools. What an exciting time to be developing for Apple platforms.
Unfortunately, any initial excitement has long been replaced by frustration. Check out some of the comments from the developer community:
I could really use Swift Assist to deal with some SwiftUI problems I’m having. None of the LLMs are particularly good at SwiftUI, and seem to be wasting more of my time than they’re saving. When, Apple???? You’re the only ones with the data and the incentive to build a really knowledgeable Swift coding LLM…. super frustrating.
Unfortunately Apple are so far behind the AI curve right now. They spent so much time on the useless AR glasses that every other company has killed off. I think [Tim Cook] thought the AR was his iPhone moment. Should have spent the time and money on AI like everyone else. Code complete is a joke compared to VSCode with Copilot.
It’s feeling more and more like this is something that will get rolled back to Xcode 17 this summer. Has anybody heard anything about it? Maybe it’ll be quietly pulled all together, in favour of better Xcode integration with Chat GPT and the like?
WWDC is starting to feel more and more like a preview of what Apple might release over the coming year – but normally the dev tools they show are shipped by the end of the summer.
It’s a bad look for Apple, especially given the current controversy surrounding the company’s delayed personalized Siri features. WWDC 2025 is less than three months away, and it seems that developers are beginning to wonder whether they’ll ever see Swift Assist in Xcode 16 at all. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.
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