The latest release of Xcode, Xcode 26.3, extends support for coding agents, such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and Open’s Codex, helping developers tackle complex tasks and improve their productivity.
With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals — from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools.
The new release expands the agentic coding capabilities introduced in Xcode 26 by providing coding agents with access to more Xcode’s features. Apple says agents can now collaborate, search documentation, explore file structures, and update project settings. Furthermore, agents have now a way to verify their code by capturing Xcode Previews. This enables them to see what the interface they are building looks like, identify any issues, and iterate from there. This is “particularly useful when building SwiftUI views, where the visual output is the thing that matters most”, says Anthropic.
Anthropic also emphasizes that Xcode 26.3 integrates the Claude Agent SDK, which powers Claude Code and allows developers to get “the full power of Claude Code […] including subagents, background tasks, and plugins”.
Another major addition in Xcode 26.3 is support for the Model Context Protocol, which lets developers use any MCP-compatible agent or tool with Xocde. This also enables the use of agents other than Claude or Codex directly within the IDE. MCP integration is enabled using xcrun mpcbridge, as shown in the following example:
codex mcp add xcode -- xcrun mcpbridge
iOS developer Akhlaq Ahmad noted on LinkedIn that the announcement appears to signal a shift from an AI coding assistant to more of an AI teammate, as agents can now interact with Xcode to “break down a goal, plan, implement, run builds/tests, and refine until things compile and behave as expected”.
While support for MCP is expected to allow Xcode to interact with external tools in ways that were not previously possible, Reddit user TrajansRow warns that the permission model “gets in the way” too often:
If you add an Xcode MCP server to an external agent system, you have to manually dismiss a “Allow “agent” to access Xcode?” Dialog every single time there is a request from a new agent PID.
However, Hacker News reader drak0n1c4 reported that MCP support in Xcode 26.3 “is flawed at the moment, as it returns a format differing from its stated schema. So it doesn’t work with OpenCode”.
While Xcode 26.3 can be installed on earlier macOS versions, AI coding support is only enabled when running macOS 26, codename Tahoe. Xcode 26.3 is currently available to Apple Developer Program members via Apple’s developer website and will soon be accessible to all developers through the App Store.
