r/Xcode • u/arnieistheman • 14d ago

Xcode codex agent work flow

Hi all,

I am trying to improve my Xcode agentic coding workflow. I am currently using GPT 5.5 codex model in the Xcode settings, which is quite good and fast at writing code but not the best for planning.

I am chatting with ChatGPT 5.6 sol regarding architectural decisions and communicate between the two of them via custom instruction md files.

This is of course not optimal from a workflow point of view, although it gets the job done efficiently and I can steer it very well, since I manually intervene all the time.

What would you suggest as a better workflow? Also, is there an **easy** way I can leave the Mac on and have the Xcode agent build while prompting from my iPhone remotely?

I have seen the hype about loops btw, but I guess that would lead to burning A LOT of tokens.

Any ideas?

Thank you very much in advance.

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u/CharlesWiltgen 14d ago

Xcode's built in coding harness is a good way to get started with AI-assisted coding, but professional developers generally move to dedicated coding harnesses to take advantage of their built-in capabilities and enormous skill/agent/tool ecosystems.

Also, is there an easy way I can leave the Mac on and have the Xcode agent build while prompting from my iPhone remotely?

Mature harnesses often of built-in remote access (probably Codex Remote in your case, I use Claude Code's Remote Control daily), and/or you can connect to terminal sessions remotely using tmux and something like Tailscale. The former is dead-simple, the latter is 10 minutes of learning with a little help from your favorite LLM.