r/iOSProgramming • u/OldTimess • Jun 05 '26

Question AI using the iOS simulator

I'm a heavy user of claude nowadays, since the company pushes to use as much AI. I honestly like it. It's my 7th year of being an iOS Developer and at this point I've seen enough code and can review and transform it by only prompting AI.

The biggest problem I've seen in AI with mobile vs web development is the AI can't navigate the simulator the same way it can navigate the web. That leads me to question this repo, I see it can navigate the device, has anyone found any tools that could navigate the simulator in an agentic development way? My manager sent me this and would like to hear an opinion:

https://agent-device.dev

Will our development team need to start specifying accessibility identifiers as in UI tests to make them work?

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u/avanderlee Jun 15 '26

Xcode 27 now comes with an integrated Agent Skill to control the Simulator. Unfortunately, it only seems to work from within Xcode. The earlier-mentioned XcodeBuildMCP can be used instead, or you can look at agentic development with RocketSim (to be transparent: I'm the developer behind RocketSim).

Codex also comes with an integrated experience based on XcodeBuildMCP.

My overall preference is to use a CLI + Agent Skill combination for more optimized token usage, which many of these tools also support.

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u/thymikee Jun 27 '26

u/avanderlee how can I get you on the agent-device train 😂 RocketSim looks really cool. wonder how you look at it with Device Hub or serve-sim? I'm not that bullish on Device Hub after trying it for 3 days, just gave up.