Welcome to the eleventh edition of AiOS Dispatch, your go-to newsletter for the latest in AI and iOS development!
Three weeks as we inch closer to WWDC 2025! Let’s dive into the updates that caught my eye last week and events for all of you iOS devs out there, especially in the US!
Sponsor: Alex Sidebar
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Codex (Agent) by OpenAI
OpenAI launched Codex, an AI coding agent integrated into ChatGPT. It is powered by the codex-1 model (a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model) and designed to automate tasks like writing code, fixing bugs, and drafting pull requests. It runs in a secure, cloud-based sandbox and integrates with GitHub to work directly with your repositories.
While I am still reluctant to pay for the Pro plan (it will be available on Plus soon), folks on socials are loving it for mundane repetitive tasks. Refactoring SwiftUI views or writing unit tests, freeing you up for more creative work!
https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex
Preparing for WWDC 2025
Following the tradition of preparing for WWDC, I wrote about how I plan to make the most out of it!
My latest post, "Exploring Conferences: Preparing for WWDC 2025", covers my approach:
Rudrank Riyam
Alex Sidebar 3.1: More Xcode Love
Alex Sidebar rolled out version 3.1 last week, building on the already impressive 3.0 release. I have been testing it, and it is finally making Xcode feel less like a chore.
My favorite feature is the new reading the console logs. Alex can read Xcode's runtime logs so that's another copy-paste work reduced for you.
There is also simulator testing with vision support to click around, enter text, scroll, and see every step of the way. It's a game-changer for UI testing and interaction debugging (macOS app support is planned for later).
Another feature that I really wanted was multi-folder indexing, something great for SPM packages or monorepos and it can also index the derived data so you have remote SPM packages available as well!
Windsurf & SWE-1
Windsurf dropped two of its models last week called SWE-1 and SWE-1 Lite and I am impressed by it, and almost on par with frontier models. It is free right now but I assume it should be 0.5x credits for SWE-1 and 0.25x credits for the lighter one.
I got the Windsurf’s Pro plan ($15/month) to try it out and here are my impressions:
- Faster than other SOTA models, both general and tool use
- Cut-off Oct 2024, so it does not have access to latest SwiftUI APIs, unlike Gemini 2.5 Pro with Jan 2025
- Good at instruction following & building features
- I will sill prefer Gemini 2.5 Pro or Sonnet 3.7 or o3 for complex tasks
AiOS Meetups: Chicago, NYC, SF and Cupertino
I like to meet new folks in the iOS community and with my focus more on making the most out of AI, I decided to host casual meetups called AiOS Meetups. Here are the details:
- Chicago: May 30, 2025
- New York: June 4, 2025
- San Fransisco: June 5, 205
- Cupertino (A big one): June 11, 2025, alongside One More Thing Conference.
Moving Forward
Intelligence used to be 'too cheap to meter'. Now, it is effectively free. So, what are you shipping this week with the leverage of AI?
Master AI-assisted iOS Development
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