Not only Swift

Most intent-based systems rely on a predefined set of domains and intents. This means that developers need to anticipate the possible actions users might want to take - and then define them upfront.

As you might imagine, this is quite limiting. For the longest time, Siri’s capabilities were constrained exactly for this reason. Developers had to work within the predefined domains and intents, which often meant that Siri couldn’t handle more specialized or custom actions.

Now, thanks to LLMs, this is no longer the case. Apple recently announced that developers can define their own schemas for Siri and App Intents.

Jordan describes how this works by way of his basketball planning app. “Apple didn’t have to invent a basketball domain first!” is probably the key sentence in this blog post.

I’m super excited to add better support for Siri to Sofia, my second brain app - this is going to make asking questions about stuff you’ve stored in your second brain a lot more convenient.

Xcode’s new JSON-based project file format is a blessing - it’s so much easier to read and write for coding agents than the old XML format.

Apple has just published xcode-project-format, a library for reading and writing JSON-based Xcode project files, to take even more of the guesswork out of working with Xcode project files.

Fun side note: this question about the old pbxproj format (which was never officially documented) is my only question on StackOverflow.

How about running Swift and SwiftUI in your app?

“Yeah, no” - I hear you say - “isn’t that what we do anyways?”

Well, with Kiln, Jared makes it possible to run interpreted Swift inside your app. This comes in handy when you’d like to embed an interactive view inside a chat view, for example to compute the amounts required to cook lasagna for a group of 30 people.

Coincidentally, Rosário and I talked about something similar on the most recent episode of Firebase After Hours (see the Firebase section below).

Daniel Saidi is well-known for generously sharing well-crafted Swift libraries and tools with the community. This library is no exception, offering a polished and flexible onboarding experience for SwiftUI apps.

However, there is one notable difference to most of Daniel’s other libraries: this one is closed source. Daniel explains the rationale behind his decision in this article.

Last week, my colleague Rosário and I went onto the Firebase After Hours livestream to talk about A2UI, which allows LLMs to send generated UIs straight to your app. If you wonder how that works, and if this is a good idea after all, watch the recording of the livestream.

I was super excited to learn that there is a SwiftUI version of A2UI as well, so if you’d like to use this in your iOS apps, now you can!

Someone built a drop-in replacement for the Firebase Emulator Suite. Firenook by Sanjevi Rau is not only 40x faster than the original - it also doesn’t require Java and looks twice as nice.

Great job!

For the past couple of months, I’ve been reflecting on what AI means for the future of hiring in software engineering. Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, explains why he retired the traditional coding interview.

Good news? It depends…

Shopify recently announced that they’d gone from a cross-platform implementation of their mobile apps to all-in, fully native implementations. As a result, testing the app had to change.

In this article, Thiago describes how their approach allowed them to make their entire app testable by agents - entirely without rendering any UI.

What’s maybe most surprising about the article: the author claims that it is written so you can use it as a spec to build the same for your app. This reminds me of whenwords by Drew Breunig (which I featured in Issue #92), a software library that shipped no code - only a spec and tests as a prompt for your coding agent.

I find automated reviews quite useful - they tend to spot things that I’ve overlooked. However, they tend to always find something, so even if you fixed all issues, they’ll still be like “here’s something else I just found…!”

In this article, Prateek shares a great write-up on how the Todoist team ended up building their own review agent. I just hope it knows when to stop 😂

Flipper Zero is a portable multi-tool device for geeks - at least according to the official website. But what can you do with it? Jan Kammerath took it upon himself to buy one, try it out, and write up his experiences in this article.

Sounds like a fun little device, and with the holidays approaching, I feel like I might have some free time on my hands to get one myself.