#xcodebuild
too bad xcodebuild caching is completely broken (Apple’s fault)
May 7, 2025 at 5:48 AM
if I am elected president, Simulator.app will open every time! and you'll never have to run xcodebuild -license again!

[13 editorials are published about how I'm running an unrealistic campaign]
March 6, 2024 at 4:34 AM
This is me asking Cursor agent to debug xcodebuild lol, we're not there yet.
November 24, 2024 at 5:13 PM
Today, I wrote about why Xcodebuild is so slow vs the Xcode GUI.

medium.com/@dimillian/w...
Why is xcodebuild slower than the Xcode GUI?
There is a bug, but also it’s designed to be that way
medium.com
October 28, 2024 at 3:02 PM
Apple can you fix xcodebuild being slow at the provisioning phase please? It literally make building outside of Xcode unusable…
November 26, 2024 at 7:34 AM
Evidence per pass. Exit status lies both ways: a pipeline returns the status of its last command, so `run | tail && commit` commits a failed run, and a green exit does not separate finished from did-nothing. xcodebuild printed TEST SUCCEEDED on a run that executed zero tests.
September 23, 2026 at 1:16 AM
Oh now I remember why I didn’t post yo forums - it is an xcodebuild bug, not a swift bug. SwiftPM doesn’t have that problem.
December 13, 2025 at 9:03 PM
🔴 We're live in 10 minutes! Join James, Pierce, Harald, and special guest Cameron Cooke, developer of the XcodeBuild MCP as he shows us how to build iOS, Mac, and other Swift apps directly from VS Code with Agent Mode! 8 AM Pacific ▶️https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2g5CUfjlII
🔴 VS Code - Let it cook - Episode 5: XcodeBuild MCP for iOS & Mac Dev with Cameron Cooke
Join James, Pierce, Harald, and special guest Cameron Cooke the developer of the XcodeBuild MCP as he shows us how to build iOS, Mac, and other Swift apps di...
www.youtube.com
June 13, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Xcodebuild awful build time boil down to network requests to check provisioning almost exclusively, this is truly a sad bug, because I actually love to debug in Cursor. Apple please fix this damn bug!
Hacked together a lil script that lets me write iOS code in Cursor. When I hit ⌘R it switches to Xcode, kicks off a new build (without xcodebuild's awful build times), and switches back to Cursor. Add this script, update your tasks.json, and pick a good key command.

gist.github.com/mergesort/6e...
November 28, 2024 at 8:02 AM
Apple engineering better by slowing down xcodebuild in the next release ❤️‍🔥
December 6, 2024 at 1:20 PM
Apple may finally deprecate xcodebuild if we can reliably build like Xcode outside of Xcode. It’ll solve many problems!

But damnit, Apple. Is it too hard to ask for an example project with a minimal setup of this?

github.com/swiftlang/sw...
GitHub - swiftlang/swift-build: A high-level build system based on llbuild, used by Xcode, Swift Playground, and the Swift Package Manager
A high-level build system based on llbuild, used by Xcode, Swift Playground, and the Swift Package Manager - swiftlang/swift-build
github.com
February 1, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Look. This is a warm build of Ice Cubes using xcodebuild. There is no reason for xcodebuild to be that slow compared to build & run in the Xcode GUI.
October 18, 2024 at 6:21 PM
Xcode build server with Swift LSP brings all the feature from Xcode. Jumping to references, inline doc, call stack, debugger etc…. The only problem is the slow xcodebuild
October 18, 2024 at 5:19 AM
Clarification: xcodebuild can *build* without a specific device, but cannot run tests. This is an important distinction. If your tests care about hosting simulator, this matters. It's just that mine never do.

(And I still think choosing a random simulator is a totally reasonable default)
April 4, 2026 at 1:16 PM
why is my letta puppygirl agent like this....
March 5, 2026 at 7:53 PM
Parallel xcodebuild test clones a simulator per worker and only cleans up on a clean exit, so crashed runs leave clones in ~/Library/Developer/XCTestDevices forever. du lies about them though: mine read 76G there, and df only moved about 1G after deleting. Real space is DerivedData.
September 19, 2026 at 1:17 AM
can we stop this apple, like please

Error: You have not agreed to the Xcode license. Please resolve this by running:
sudo xcodebuild -license accept
September 20, 2026 at 2:54 PM
Can you ship iOS apps without ever opening Xcode? One thread explores headless builds using xcodebuild, SwiftPM, and Fastlane.
Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
Four Signals — The Wire
www.foursignals.dev
July 14, 2026 at 10:00 PM
I can't wait for Apple Intelligence to start keeping context for our contacts identities across Messages, Slack and Mail for Summaries.

"Mark is bitching about xcodebuild again. Mary is trolling him about it. Same old, same old"

"John wants to go to Cheapolte for lunch - again WTF."

#AI #humor
Amused by the Apple Intelligence summary here 🤣 I think you should sue for slander.
December 7, 2024 at 11:38 PM
I guess I'm missing something with Swift Build. I have built the CLI and I'm trying to compile a project, but I don't know how to set the desired architecture like with xcodebuild, the only param I see are --target and --configuration.
February 1, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Introducing XcodeBuild MCP
A project I've been working on to make Xcode automation easier
www.async-let.com
April 12, 2025 at 1:34 AM
AppCode was faster at running tests than Xcode. Alas, for some time now I've back in Xcode-land, where I thought everyone else lived, right? Running tests inside Xcode (applying the many speed-ups I show in qualitycoding.org/optimize-xco...). Because `xcodebuild test` is SLOW.
But…
I made Xcode's tests 60 times faster
I made Xcode's tests 60 times faster
Time is our most precious resource, as both humans and programmers. An 8-hour workday contains 480 minutes. Out of the box, running a new iOS app's test suite from the terminal using xcodebuild test takes over 25 seconds on my M4 MacBook Pro. After extracting my application code into a Swift package—such that the application project itself contains virtually no code at all—running swift test against the same test suite now takes as little as 0.4 seconds. That's over 60 times faster. Given 480 minutes, that's the difference between having a theoretical upper bound of 1152 potential actions per day and having 72,000. If that number doesn't immediately mean anything to you, you're not alone. I've been harping on the importance of tightening this particular feedback loop my entire career. If you want to see the same point made with more charts and zeal, here's me saying the same shit a decade ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmPcVTHmdVo&t=1912s): https://www.youtube.com/embed/jmPcVTHmdVo?start=1912 And yes, it's true that if you run tests through the Xcode GUI it's faster, but (1) that's no way to live, (2) it's still pretty damn slow, and (3) in a world where Claude Code exists and I want to constrain its shenanigans by running my tests in a hook (/posts/tldr-is-the-best-test-runner-for-claude-code), a 25 second turnaround time from the CLI is unacceptably slow. Anyway, here's how I did it, so you can too.
justin.searls.co
July 26, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Had some new findings on this:

- Increasing JVM settings has no effect on build time
- The "link" task on KGP is the main issue. This task delegates the linking process to LLVM.
- xcodebuild -create-xcframework seems to have a virtual impact.
- Could not find any LLVM hack to boost CPU usage
Found something interesting 🔎

XCFramework assembly on KMP uses ~9% of my CPU 👀 maybe that's why it takes so long to finish (40 minutes on my M3 pro)

Does anyone know how to speed up this execution? Maybe a hidden flag? 🤔
January 7, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Interesting to see Xcode's Agentic AI using the terminal to run `xcodebuild` directly — this is good news, because I know many dev's who have created custom wrappers for this command, because its output is so verbose, even AI's can't parse it easily. This dogfooding should lead to improvements 🤞
February 5, 2026 at 3:24 PM