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Swift Assist Hasn’t Shipped, and Isn’t Yet in Beta
Michael Tsai: Swift Assist was supposed to arrive in 2024, but it never even appeared in a beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s postponed or cancelled. It’s not even mentioned in the release notes. Basically, Apple announced two AI-powered features for Xcode last year: predictive code completion and Swift Assist. Predictive code completion is basically getting suggestions for what you might intend to write next. Swift Assist is far more ambitious, runs only in the cloud (via Private Cloud Compute), and promises to write entire components for you. So much like the rest of Apple Intelligence, it’s the simpler thing that has shipped, and the more radical ambition thing that has not. I looked into Swift Assist this week while researching, and checking my notes from WWDC, for my long piece yesterday. I had an entire briefing with the Xcode team at WWDC last year, and alas, I was late for it (previous briefing, with a different team, had started late), so I missed some stuff and my notes are unusually terse, alas. What I wanted to check my notes for is whether or not I was shown a live demo of Swift Assist last June. But my notes don’t say, and my own memory is completely unsure whether the demos I saw performed were only for predictive code completion, or included Swift Assist. If anyone else who was in those WWDC briefings remembers whether Swift Assist was actually demoed, please let me know. I’m genuinely curious if Swift Assist was another thing — like all of “more personalized Siri” — that wasn’t even in demonstratable shape at WWDC. ★
Michael Tsai:
Swift Assist was supposed to arrive in 2024, but it never even appeared in a beta. Apple hasn’t announced that it’s postponed or cancelled. It’s not even mentioned in the release notes.
Basically, Apple announced two AI-powered features for Xcode last year: predictive code completion and Swift Assist. Predictive code completion is basically getting suggestions for what you might intend to write next. Swift Assist is far more ambitious, runs only in the cloud (via Private Cloud Compute), and promises to write entire components for you. So much like the rest of Apple Intelligence, it’s the simpler thing that has shipped, and the more radical ambition thing that has not.
I looked into Swift Assist this week while researching, and checking my notes from WWDC, for my long piece yesterday. I had an entire briefing with the Xcode team at WWDC last year, and alas, I was late for it (previous briefing, with a different team, had started late), so I missed some stuff and my notes are unusually terse, alas. What I wanted to check my notes for is whether or not I was shown a live demo of Swift Assist last June. But my notes don’t say, and my own memory is completely unsure whether the demos I saw performed were only for predictive code completion, or included Swift Assist.
If anyone else who was in those WWDC briefings remembers whether Swift Assist was actually demoed, please let me know. I’m genuinely curious if Swift Assist was another thing — like all of “more personalized Siri” — that wasn’t even in demonstratable shape at WWDC.
